Getting started at the application company

This morning I finally had the time to post something on the blog again. It's been a busy first part of the week, with the second full day at my application company on Tuesday and my graduation party on Wednesday. Since I was the first to have an application company, I'll tell you a bit about my experiences so far.

The idea behind these application companies is that each student has the opportunity to immediately put everything they learned into practise. The Master thesis will be written as an advisory report for this company, although they won't be grading it. While most of my fellow students are still struggling to find an application company, I had the opportunity to start already in week 1 of the Master programme.
Months before the Master started, me and my girlfriend visited the Zoo in Emmen (http://www.zoo-emmen.nl/). She had worked there for a while, and through her I found out about the plans to move the Zoo from the city centre to a location outside the city. This involves designing a 33ha Zoo from scratch, but also reviewing all the human processes regarding customer contact and redesigning the entire back office to suit the characteristics of the new Zoo. I figured this would be the perfect application company for my Master in Imagineering. When I first met people from the Master, I told them about my ideas regarding the Zoo, and I found out that the Zoo had already asked them for advice. So I had a nice way in.
In the months after, I convinced the Zoo about how I could help them, and they agreed to employ me for one day a week, and in the course of the year expand that to two days, and finally full-time. In return, they would pay the tuition fee for the Master.

I started two weeks ago, and there wasn't a lot for me to do since the people I was supposed to work with were out of office for most of the day. So I just focussed on getting some basic things done, like requesting keys to the office and login data for the computer network.
A week later, I joined the marketing manager and the programme manager (who is in charge of the development of the new Zoo) on a trip to a market research organization in Zoetermeer. They where doing interviews with possible visitors of the new Zoo, who were selected on age, social class and income, and were asked to participate given the fact that they go on day trips every now and then. These people didn't know why they were there and what they would be talking about, neither did they know about the plans for the new Zoo in Emmen. Therefore they gave us a nice insight of how the average Dutch family would respond on the plans and, more importantly, whether they would like to pay us a visit. There was also a lot of nice feedback about for example the routing in the Zoo and the possible price for a ticket.
Having met most of the people working on the development of the new Zoo, last Tuesday I met a couple of people who keep the current (old) Zoo running. Together with the marketing manager I agreed on my activities for the coming months. I will be looking into how they want the visitors to experience the Zoo, then team up with some key members of the staff to find out how they think about their jobs, contact with visitors, the role of management and what they themselves add to the experience of the visitor. At the same time I will be doing research among visitors, probably using a questionnaire, to find out how they actually experience the Zoo and what they think about the role of its personnel. Then, in the remainder of the year, I will be doing a lot of supporting research to finally come up with a report giving advice on how the new Zoo can give the visitors an even better experience than they hope for, and how to arrange the entire organization in order to facilitate in that.
I put my plans on paper last Tuesday and right now I'm waiting for them to be approved, so I can start doing my research. It's already clear that I will have a lot of freedom to do what I want. There's an office I can use each Tuesday, but I can also arrange meetings somewhere else if necessary. I will also be doing several jobs throughout the Zoo for one day, to get a good picture of what everybody does and what it takes to keep an organization like that running. I'm anxious to start!

Today I'll be back in Breda after skipping an interesting guest lecture yesterday, because I had my graduation party in Leeuwarden. Hopefully it'll be easy to get up to date with all that's been said and discussed yesterday. Today will be about the 'Age of Experience', which to me seems like a pretty vague subject but I hope the lecturer will come up with some inspiring insights. I'll let you know how it all worked out.