One week before my Indian adventure
In 7 days I’ll land in India for the first time to start an exciting month!
Everything started more than 2 years ago with an extremely busy work year 2015 where I spent a lot of time working, helping my customers as much as I can. I didn’t count my hours, from very early in the morning working with Australian, Philippines, Chinese and Indian colleagues until late in the evening for being in touch with US West coast.
This hard work paid because, beginning of 2016, one of the recognitions was to be able to participate in the selection of the so-called “SAP Social Sabbatical” program. The SAP Social Sabbatical is a “short term assignment for SAP’s talents to work in international, cross functional teams to solve business challenges for the education and social entrepreneurship sector in emerging markets”.
As soon as I read the email explaining that, I knew that I wanted to participate! So, I sent my application and, after a first selection with my resume and cover letter, I was able to go to the 2nd round: an interview to demonstrate my motivation.
After this call, I wasn’t very confident to be selected because I wasn’t satisfied by my performance and they only select 120 employees out of 84.000+.
A few weeks after, I received the excellent news, that I was selected (and not in the waiting list)!!! I was surprised but so happy and proud. I knew that I’ll spend 1 month in 2016 or 2017 in one of the following countries: South Africa, India, Brazil, Ghana, Peru, Greece, Philippines, Panama, Ghana, Rwanda to work in the education or social entrepreneurship with 11 other SAP employees!
In June 2016, I was finally assigned to the team that will go to India in February 2017! Great, because even if I worked a lot with Indian colleagues in my different jobs, I never travelled to India and I’m anticipating a huge cultural shock!!!
End of 2016, I prepared several administrative (and surprisingly challenging) items like getting a business visa and get inoculated with all mandatory and recommended vaccines.
Now, 6 days before my departure, I’m starting packing all my stuff with a lot of images in my head…
