India: The 2-Day Journey - Part 1

I didn't expect much from the Delta Airlines flight from San Francisco to Atlanta since the airline has been flirting with bankrupcy the past couple of years, but the onboard experience was pretty good. Each seat was equipped with a TV monitor showing programming from Dish Network, which was a nice distraction from some of the other things I could have been thinking about. Sleep as usual was hard to come by despite the flight being really smooth. I haven't been on a flight so smooth in the last couple of years.

After arriving in Atlanta, I went straight to baggage claim and met a group of people also traveling to India for the Infosys training. All four were from the UC system. We waited for the hotel shuttle to come pick us up and in the process, the hot and humid Georgia weather was causing us to sweat. When the shuttle finally arrived, we joined a second Infosys group and we headed towards the hotel.

At the Hilton hotel, I checked in and went up to my room to change. I lugged my two bags into my room and found my roommate already inside. He's from Dallas so he didn't have as far to travel. After changing into business casual attire, I met all the future Infosys trainees near one of the Hilton's meeting rooms. The group consisted of 55 total people, approximately 10 girls and 45 guys and interestingly enough, there weren't too many Computer Science majors. I would guess probably 10-15 of us are CS majors. The rest are either Electrical or some other form of engineer or economics/math majors.

The meeting started at about 3:00 p.m. ET, about 30 minutes late due to some late arrivals. The meeting consisted of a team activity involving half pipes, a marble, and a cup that I could only describe as a fun way to meet some other members of the group. Once all the teams went, an HR respresentive introduced us to the company while another person did a presentation on the cultural aspects of India that we should look out for. We followed that up with a nice dinner courtesy of Infosys.