My TY - B.N.Y. Mellon
By Darren Moore
My name is Darren. I’m in Transition Year and I took part in the B.N.Y. Mellon survey and trip to the B.N.Y. building itself. But first, maybe I should explain who and/or what the B.N.Y Mellon Group and what the survey was about.
The letters B.N.Y stand for the Bank of New York and they are an investments company with locations across the globe, in Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The survey was about the expectations of future employees about their workplace and employers and asked questions like ‘Would you be willing to go abroad for work in the finance and tech sectors?
18 students, including myself, were given the results of the survey and we all did reports on the results. We then went down with our reports to the B.N.Y. Mellon building in Wexford in order to present them to the speakers and a few members of management.
It was a great day altogether I think. We started off with getting split up into three different groups and we each got a tour of a different floor. My group got to see one of the boardrooms and another large room where there were a lot of the employee desks. When we went into one of the boardrooms, our tour guide talked about how the room was set up so it could hold video conferences so this branch of the company could have meetings with the rest of the other branches from all over the world.
After that we all regrouped and went to a different boardroom to wait for the speakers to arrive.
The first speaker to talk to us was David Murphy who played senior football for Wexford for over a decade with a Leinster final against Dublin and an All-Ireland semi-final in front of 70,000 people under his belt. It was very interesting to listen to him talk about balancing his work life, sporting career and general life and his advice about how to balance them all.
The second speaker that talked to us was Paul Curtis who talked to us about balancing sport, work and general life. He said that some people see their sport as their relaxation, but Paul was saying that you other relaxation times where you actually just do nothing and relax, maybe even just watching a film and/or reading a book.
The third and last speaker that spoke to the group was Ian O’Reilly. Ian talked to us mainly about the importance of having a good mind-set and being aware of what mind-set you’re in at the moment and how to improve it. He spoke about the importance of not saying to yourself ‘’I can’t do it’’ but rather ‘’I can do this with a bit more work’’.
I think it was a great day all in all and I’m glad I was given the opportunity to take part as part of my TY course.