Austin - First Day

My desk

Today was my first day at work. I was extremely excited but also a little scared; scared because everything is new to me and I don’t know what to expect, haha. I guess that’s normal for everyone. Anyway, once we’ve got our employee card – RFID card actually – we proceeded for our orientation at the conference room. During the orientation, they briefed us on many things such as how to fill up our employment forms, a few agreement papers, and then told us about some security matters; things like how to be careful about the confidential information and export restrictions on certain technologies that would aid in the making of nuclear weapons. Yup, NI’s products are well-sought after for the production of nuclear weapons and military applications – eg frequency jammers. They also told us that there a law or some kind of agreement where certain NI products can only be revealed to US citizens only! It happened on one occasion where a non-US citizen employee had to wait at the hall while the meeting was being held because certain restricted equipments were being presented. Wow… It reminds me espionage in my Engineering Society study. XD Once we were all briefed, our mentors came to take us. Hon Mun and I are mentored by Tim. He brought us to our desk then took us around the floor to meet the other engineers in our hardware department. I was told by Tim that my scope is called sustainance whereby I am tasked to improve the older devices to current technology and fix bugs reported by the customers while Hon Mun is tasked to do the power supply. When all has been settled, we sat on our desk and set up the email and messaging system. Apparently, they use Lotus Notes to manage emails and calendar and Lotus’s Sametime which is a kind of messaging software like YM. We can add anyone employed in NI as long you know their names. Cool eh? Haha.