Reflections on my summer internship at Earthmover

Now that I’m almost two months back into Ph.D. life 🤯, I wanted to share some reflections from my summer internship at Earthmover and the lessons I learned.

At the beginning of the fall semester, when asked, I could identify several concrete takeaways from my time at Earthmover: I gained many new technical skills, such as working with data across different cloud object stores; building workflows using distributed, cloud-hosted compute resources; and diving into the world of property-based and stateful testing. I also had the chance to improve my technical writing by working on documentation, code example ‘cookbooks,’ and blog posts, and I got to sit in on internal and external meetings where we spent time discussing nitty details, sketching out plans for how to progress on big ideas, and working through different types of challenges. Underpinning all of this was the experience of joining a team of creative, generous, and excited people with whom I enjoyed working every day.

These skills and experiences have already helped me as I’ve been back in school, and it has been fun to apply these lessons while returning to a familiar setting with a refreshed perspective. Navigating research challenges this fall has helped me to realize even more lessons that I learned during my internship, which I’ll try to share briefly below.

1. Everything is a learning opportunity.

Every situation, interaction, and challenge is full of information. This summer, in response to a range of situations, I saw the Earthmover team work efficiently to execute whatever tasks were most pressing (fixing a bug, reaching out to a customer or partner, etc.) and communicate who was doing what and how the rest of the team could best support them. The clear, direct communication helped us to move forward quickly and confidently. Frequently, the immediate resolution would be followed by someone sharing what they learned from the situation. These reflections, whether offered spontaneously or in regular meetings where we had time built-in for this kind of thinking and discussion, helped us to share knowledge and experiences within our team, build consensus on key topics, and work through challenging situations while maintaining a positive outlook. 

In the last few months, keeping this lesson at the front of my mind has helped me to move through difficulties and ‘low points’ more quickly and with a better mindset than I would have otherwise had. Continually asking myself, ‘What did I just learn?’ and ‘Knowing this, how should I adjust my next steps?’ has helped me to be more efficient with my time and energy and to avoid getting knocked off track by challenging outcomes and situations.

At Earthmover, we talked about helping ourselves and those around us perform our best by assuming that others are acting in good faith and with the best intentions. Prioritizing what I can learn from challenging situations (even when they may feel negative or overwhelming) can be a way of actualizing my commitment to assuming good faith from others and of creating and supporting the kind of work environment I want to be a part of. 

2. How you feel about what you’re doing not only matters but is an important part of achieving what you’re trying to do.

We also regularly spent time discussing how we felt about what we were working on. This was new to me in a professional setting, and at first, it felt a bit hard to do. However, seeing this type of reflection and communication modeled by Earthmover leadership and team members helped me to dive into this practice. I realized that I was pretty used to ‘shutting off’ my feelings while I was working and that this often led to ‘powering through’ to get something done, especially when I was feeling stressed or rushed, and that, ultimately, this approach probably did more harm than good. 

During my internship, I watched the Earthmover team as they navigated and designed big changes. These included identifying and aligning around new directions for the company, sketching out transformational changes to their product, and starting to execute these plans. Throughout this process, we were encouraged to spend time reflecting on how things were going, regularly checked in with the team, and made adjustments to our projects as needed. Watching this, I learned that not only can suppressing how I’m feeling cause me to miss important signals that are worth listening to, but if I’m feeling poorly about what I’m doing, I probably won’t be doing my best work. 

Since being back in school, I’ve encountered preliminary results that necessitated a relatively significant shift in my research approach. When I first saw these results, I felt the urge to not step back, to bear down and not change course, or to make a slight tweak, push through, and see if that yielded different information. I felt scared of the setback, the ‘wasted’ effort, and the uncertainty this brought. Acknowledging these feelings has been an important part of working through challenges and developing a research plan that I feel good about (read: that I believe will lead to sound, robust, and useful scientific results). Taking stock of new information with an awareness of my emotions surrounding it has helped me to evaluate that information more objectively and, ultimately, to develop an approach that I feel much more confident in. As a teammate mentioned this summer, whether we realize it or not, how we’re feeling impacts what we do; it’s best to be aware of that impact rather than to ignore it 🙃. 

3. The last one is short and sweet: When you are feeling good about your work and being specific and intentional about the work you do, you can make amazing progress in short periods of time and have fun doing it 😀.

Some of this may sound self-evident, and on some level, I probably knew many of these lessons were important beforehand. But learning them as I did, through working with the Earthmover team, drove these lessons home for me in a new way. I think this speaks to the importance and value of internships and hands-on, team-based projects as learning opportunities. I’m grateful to everyone at Earthmover for welcoming me to the team, being selfless in their time and energy, and helping me learn new skills and develop confidence in my abilities along the way. 

Finally, my direct supervisor, Deepak Cherian , deserves a special shout-out. Everything I learned this summer was made possible through Deepak’s patient and generous approach to mentoring. He encouraged me to push myself in new directions, supported me as I flailed when starting difficult projects, and helped me to connect with others on the Earthmover team (not always easy on a fully remote team!). Whether it was talking about what makes good technical documentation, helping to debug tricky test code, or experimenting with Xarray indexes, Deepak shows that it is always possible to break down complex and challenging topics into easier-to-understand, accessible concepts and models an approach to problem-solving that has helped me to become a better scientist.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and be sure to check out the next webinar or blog post from Earthmover, where I’m sure they’ll be sharing whatever incredibly cool and exciting things they’re working on now 🙂.