So after Europe, a brief trip home, and a cross-country drive, I got to work full time at the Phoenix offices of the software firm I had been working for remotely in New Zealand.

(Just in case you’re wondering, I have intentionally concealed information about the company to prevent the competition from finding my blog.)

Looking back over a year later, it’s hard to count the number of ways the job helped me, but I’ll try. I’ve improved my skills with:

1. Understanding people better
2. Thinking more logically
3. Communicating more effectively
4. Mediating the inherent contradictions of life
5. Appreciating basic business facts not taught in a classroom
6. Effectively organizing large amounts of information
7. Producing effective business writing
8. Navigating office politics
9. Analyzing (and sometimes predicting) technology trends
10. Recovering from my mistakes

I was very lucky to have this opportunity and it would not have been possible without the support of many people, and chief among them was Paul, my friend/uncle/boss/mentor. Paul is certainly one of the most hardworking, selfless, and committed people I know. He helped, and continues to help, me in so many ways even if that means occasionally giving me a verbal ass kicking. It would take all the pages of a novel to fully describe all of his valuable traits, and I’m glad to have been exposed to them. I’ll also be sure to ignore his not-so-great qualities that would only fill the novel’s dust jacket.

I was under no allusion that by making this move to Phoenix I was putting heavy emphasis on the professional side of my life and putting the academic and social parts on the back burner. Luckily, The University of Auckland Business School has a fairly flexible policy when it comes to earning credits abroad. As far as I can tell, I could have gone to any university and earned credits as long as they had equivalent courses. So, I just took some part time courses at Arizona State University (which I just finished.) As for a social life, I naively thought that by finding random roommates on the Internet I could also find some friends. That didn’t work, twice. I finally got my own one bedroom apartment and met up with some cool people from ASU.

So once I was situated in Phoenix, I concentrated mostly on working hard, but I did manage to have some fun from time to time…

This is the fourth of nine posts recapping events between April 2004 and November 2006. Click here for the overview.