[SchruteBeet]

Apologize for the long post in advance — I have been at this accounting firm for 10 months now (new associate) and have been traveling on a project for 4.5 months now. I travel every Sun-Thu and was told this project would last “at least 6 months”. The project has been ongoing for over a year now and there are no signs of it being over anytime soon. I am the only person on my team who travels this far – everyone else is from the local office of the city where the client is based. I feel burned out and honestly, very frustrated. I have constantly been tired, feel like being thrown around, I have been eating out every single day, have a hard time sticking to my schedule (can’t even study during lunch because the team does group lunches every single day). I feel like I have no control over my schedule. Most of the weeks that I am there, I feel like I could have done the same work remotely but everytime I remotely ask my manager to let me work from my local office, she hesitates and tells me I benefit from staying on site. I am not even invited to client meetings and spend 10 hours of my day in a conference room barring the coffee runs I have to make. The other issue is, all of the team members are pretty tight and since they’re from the same office, they always talk about their office-specific topics and even after 4.5 months, I feel like I have a hard time fitting in. My performance reviews have been good but I am really frustrated. I have a CPA exam next week and they asked me to come down that week too (for 1.5 days). I really want to roll off this particular project. How do I approach this professionally? Would it be a good idea to talk to my mentor about this?

[reallytired]

Definitely talk to your mentor about it! We had a similar issue in my office where the associate was sent down to Vegas every week for almost a year and he absolutely hated it. He finally talked to his mentor, who helped him devise a way to talk to the manager about how he was unhappy. They took him off the job and now he is significantly happier!

B 10/29/16
A 10/1/16
R 9/2/16
F 7/26/16

[SchruteBeet]

Thanks, @reallytired. Makes sense. Anyone else?

[Author]

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