Today I fly from London back to Los Angeles and intend on staying with my parents for the weekend before returning to San Diego. It is a mixture of sadness for leaving London and excitement to getting back to San Diego that has driven me these past two days.

Well I was in Washington D.C. this past week since Wednesday. I had an opportunity to pitch my Management Report to our Head Office, and I feel it was warmly received.

I had undertaken a study of “Branding for Generation X and Millennials: How to Recruit and Retain.” This was primarily due to the fact I was noticing a turnover within my company of young professionals and was curious why, and how to retain them. As part of my process I surveyed over 800 young professionals around the U.S. and asked them questions on what they wanted in compensation and benefits packages, work environments, and lastly, asked them to identify Corporate Brands and rank them in order of prestige.

Some interesting data came out of it. I will over the next month or so share some of those insights, but alas, I am still trying to finish the deck for management to succintly describe the primary themes I discovered.

So it is starting to hit me slowly that I will be returning home in about three weeks. Wow, my adventures here over the past two years in London have been fun and varied. I remembered when I started my MBA back in September 2005 what a different person I was.

Now I graduate more global, more well rounded, and sadly with a higher debt to the Earth. Yes, I just calculated my Carbon Footprint, and let us say in 2006 it was ugly. I mean if you really think about it, I had clocked up over 175,000 air miles. That was between commuting from San Diego to London every fortnight for school, and work.

So needless to say I will be planting a tree every year for the rest of my life. Either that or donating money somewhere to offset my Carbon Emissions.

Once again I was having a chat with some friends today and we started to discuss the amount of travel I completed last year. Everyone asked me how many miles I had clocked last year, and my initial answer was “a lot.” However, after some moments of reflection I became curious to know the actual miles I flown last year.

So after I had a few more pints at the pub I headed home and logged into American Airlines Website (my preferred carrier of choice and I wasn’t paid to say that, but I’ll happily accept Air Miles as compensation).  It appears I flew last year 154,382 miles on American Airlines and 30,142 miles on United Airlines.   So the total miles were 171,881 for 2006.

That is kind of scary when you estimate that I have spent over 312 hours (the equivalent of almost 13 days) on a plane. Talk about mind boggling.

So I was browsing the web, like I normally do when I should be studying. And I found this cool little website that lets you make a graphical representation of where in the World you have been. I couldn’t resist, thinking I was quite the worldly individual, but in reality it appears that I have only visited about 4% of the World’s Countries (10 to be exact).

To be specific, I have visited: Bahamas, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, United Kingdom, and of course the United States. Wow I feel so unworldly now…

So to cancel out my feelings of inadequacy, I plotted the number of states I visited in the U.S., which was 21 states (or 41%):