So I am Starting a Blog

Well here I am. Sitting on an airplane. Before you jump to any conclusions, I am not in fact on the plane to Amsterdam. I am instead on a flight to Chicago because I am a crazy person. The Jenny of 3 months ago thought it would be no big deal to travel 10 days before Bill and I move half way across the world. Well Jenny from 3 months ago, you were mistaken. Moving is in fact very stressful. Our house right now looks like a tornado went through it. There are boxes and bags and bubble wrap everywhere. I have a google sheet (because as an accountant even my personal life is documented in excel format) with a list about 50 items deep of things I need to do before moving thousands of miles away. Bill and I have a full schedule of lunches, happy hours, and dinners with various friends and family for one last goodbye. But yes, let’s get on an airplane and leave town for 5 days. Half of the trip is for a very good reason. A bachelorette party of a very dear TCU swimming friend. We are missing the wedding, one of drawbacks of moving abroad – missing milestones. There will be weddings, births, birthdays, etc. that we will miss. This is a milestone for Bill and I though. We are young and haven’t started nor are we ready to start a family just yet. So we have decided to delay adulthood 2 years and go on an adventure. Have passport will travel as they say.

I caught the travel bug early in life. I am so thankful Bill has the same passion to see the world as I do. As scary as it will be to leave everything we know behind, with Bill by my side I know I will be just fine. Hopefully even thriving. As we started pursuing our rotations many people asked me if I would write a blog. Let me say, I hate blogs. I mean, why does some random person think I should spend time reading their thoughts and opinions on things. Yet here I am. Writing my first entry of a blog. I ultimately decided that while people probably don’t care about what I have to say and I am hardly the authority on travel, I want to have my own personal record of my adventures over the next two years. If someone else wants to keep up with our travels they are more than welcome. Selfishly, I hope people read it. It means people are interested in what Bill and I are up to and haven’t forgotten us. Hopefully our loved ones will feel a little closer to us and feel like a part of our big adventure. I can’t promise, however, I will be very good at blogging. I have a tendency to be very factual – an accountant factual, shocking I know – which doesn’t lead to very riveting content. I solemnly swear I will do my best to throw in some humor with my facts.

So some facts, I knew I wanted to do an international rotation through EY basically since I first heard about it at one recruiting event or another. Of course there are hoops to jump through if this is something you want to pursue. First, you have to have been at the firm long enough to have a few years of top reviews. A good motivation to be good at my job. Next, you have to build a business case for going international. That was probably the hardest part of this whole thing. I was on Lockheed for 3 years but I knew I couldn’t build an international case around that. Even though they send planes all over the world, all of the audit work is done domestically. So when the opportunity to go the Fluor was presented to me I snatched it. I knew Fluor had international opportunities. This was my ticket abroad.

As I got closer and closer to actually applying for the program, the question was where would we want to call home. Where did I want to go and more importantly, where could I go that Bill could get a transfer with KPMG. Bill didn’t necessarily have a business case so we needed to focus on a city that had a large financial services market – Bill’s area of expertise. Conveniently, the two cities I could build a business case around were London and Amsterdam. We thought we wanted to go to London. I wanted to take the tube and go to high tea and the theater. Then I went to London for work. Several armpits in my face during the tube rush hour quickly put a lid on my romanticized view of London. So Amsterdam it was!

I spent a full year on the team before officially starting the process of applying for the Global Exchange Program (GEP) back in May of 2017. Yes you read that correctly. May of last year. It’s a little deceiving of EY. They send out this every year advertising the GEP like it’s something you can just apply for. Not the case. You have to get on the list to receive the application. While the application doesn’t come out until February each year, you have to get on the list almost a year before that. After some calls, I was on the list. Now all that was left to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Until February 2018 when the application became available. The problem was once I turned in the application I wouldn’t hear back on my acceptance until June. So I waited. And waited again. Then the day arrived. My acceptance came across my email one fateful morning in San Antonio teaching the youths of EY. After that is was off to the races. Less than 3 months to go global.

Prior to going abroad in July they bring the full EY GEP class to New Jersey (very exciting location) for an orientation. It’s a 2 – 3 day crash course before we ship out. While we were there, we met the majority of the group that would be starting in Amsterdam in the coming months. My starting group consisted of myself, two other girls (Jaclyn and Christy) and 2 gentlemen (Spencer and Ryan). I didn’t end up spending much time with the Amsterdam crew because we weren’t seated together – which in retrospect is dumb because you would think they would want us to get to know each other beforehand – but I am sure we would be spending a lot of time together through our rotation. Bill and I are arriving about a month before anyone else which is a bit nerve racking as we will get to be the test subjects for everything.

These 3 months have been a blur. We have listed the house, packed many many boxes, worked our last days and now we leave in 10 days. And I am on a plane. Not to Amsterdam. I’m crazy. Crazy or not it’s wheels up in 10 days because we have our passports, and it’s time to travel. I hope you enjoy the adventure with us!