First-Year National Training in Georgia

Note: I'm finishing this post in October 2011. A tad late, but better to have it recorded than to completely forget, right?

We are the equivalent of 5 year-olds at Deloitte. As such, we had to go to pre-school. However, our pre-school wasn't at your neighbor's house down the street. Deloitte holds its first year training at a conference center in Peachtree City, GA (about 45 mins south of Atlanta).

A couple offices that had the most representatives, including Nashville, TN; Birmingham, AL; New York, NY; and our very own McLean, VA. As the week went on, we saw more and more that the Nashville crew were the biggest party animals. Apparently they function better on no sleep than the rest of us.

During the daytime, we had lots of classes about how Deloitte works and the audit theory and other such exciting things. At night was when we had the real fun.

On Sunday night, we had team Olympics and then there was a welcoming happy hour. Both were great ways to meet a bunch of the other first-years and the instructors as well.

Drew about to show off his standing broad-jump skills

[Note: Tragically, it was during the Olympics that my camera ran out of juice. When I got back to my room, I searched and searched through my bag before realizing that I must have left the charger at home in Virginia. Bummer! So, I'm sorry to say, there aren't many pics from this week.]

Anyway, on Tuesday night we all took advantage of the conference center's amenities by playing racquetball and tennis, swimming in the pools, and then lounging in the hot tubs. Wednesday night I went for a run after dinner and then chilled with friends (both old and new) on the patio. We didn't really do anything; we just talked and shot the breeze. Oh, and then later we played some card games.

Thursday night was the big one. The instructors hosted a big quiz show and each team sent one person up at a time to compete against the representative from the other teams. Questions were in many forms, from just asking to using audio and visual aides, which kept the game interesting. My team didn't win, but I got my question right and earned some points for my team, so I felt good to contribute.

After the quiz show, there was another happy hour, and then just about everyone (both first-years and instructors) went to a local bar for karaoke. We all had a great time, and it made me laugh how most people were timid about singing until they'd had a few drinks. Even though I wasn't drinking, I was happy to hop up on stage and sing, and I even organized a group of the guys to join me in doing "Fight for Your Right (to Party)". That's my go-to karaoke song for dudes, because it requires little-to-no actual singing ability and the whole bar joins in and yells along for the chorus.

Friday we had classes again, filled out evaluations about the week's material and our instructors, and then we had to head to the buses and ride to the airport. Most of the sad goodbyes were done at the conference center, so then the bus ride was social and happy again as we recalled our fun moments from the training.