Arriving in Budapest

On Friday, after 6 months of anticipation, 3 months of training, and 18 hours of travel, I finally arrived in Budapest to begin my IBM Corporate Service Corp (CSC) assignment. I was so excited (albeit tired!) to finally get settled in this beautiful country where I'll be spending the next month living, learning, and working.

So first I should probably explain what the CSC is. The CSC is IBM's global corporate outreach program designed to build short-term, diverse, international teams of IBMers chartered with helping to solve community problems in the world while in return developing their own leadership and global management skills. From the IBM website the program is defined as: "IBM launched the pro bono Corporate Service Corps in 2008 primarily as a vehicle for global leadership development. Teams of from eight to 15 members partner with government, business and civic leaders in emerging markets to address high-priority issues such as education, health and economic development. Individual CSC teams spend three months learning about the communities and the problems they’ll address before spending four weeks on the ground working with local organizations and other relevant local stakeholders to develop recommendations for short-term and long-term actions." For more information about the program and examples of past projects, please visit the IBM website.

I am very excited about my particular assignment because my CSC team is the first to be deployed to Hungary. Hence we are the "CSC HU1" team. #CSCHU1 We began our pre-work in July and our assignment here in Budapest on Saturday. So here we are on Wednesday, October 3, and so far we have participated in orientation, team site-seeing, client introductory sessions, an opening ceremony, individual "free-time", and a TON of team bonding!! My team of 14 talented IBMers is amazing. They represent 8 different countries (Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Phillippines, UAE, USA and Vietnam) from multiple business units within IBM. You can see our team blog, as well as links to my teammates' individual blogs, here.

CSC HU1 Team

We are looking forward to getting started on our team assignments!