Assimilation
December 05, 2016
-3 minute read
I'm currently on a year in industry, working at Eli Lilly and Company in Basingstoke. As part of my degree, I take a year to out to work, giving me invaluable experience, but also giving me time and space to figure out my ideal career path. In this post I'll talk about the first few weeks there and the process of settling in.
This is my first entry into the corporate world, previous jobs having been at much smaller companies.
There was so much take in at the beginning: business skills, information about the company, names and faces - never mind the technology! I feel like a lot of this was tacit knowledge, particularly the unwritten rules and expectations that came with being a new intern.
Initial Pressure
It didn't help that the student I was replacing, Tom, was one of the best in his cohort. He did an amazing job helping me to find my feet, but hearing him recount his accomplishments often made me think 'how could I ever come close?'.
A new graduate, Alex, started in our team at the same time as I did. Our skillsets were (are?) quite different, so I don't think we felt too much competition, but there was an unavoidable element of comparison. In hindsight, this was a good thing, because it made me hold myself to a higher standard, but in the early days it added another facet to the pressure!
One of the scariest things Tom and Alex 'suggested' I do was run a 'lunch and learn' - present a topic of my choice at a lunchtime. The audience was mainly the new students, which was a relief in the way that no higher-ups were there, but of course I didn't want to look like an idiot in from of my peers!
Looking back, this was probably the single most valuable thing for increasing my confidence, and gaining exposure - thanks guys.
Information overload
Along with the 'big shoes to fill', there was an vast amount of incoming information. From company mission through departmental responsibilities all the way to individual roles, it was definitely a case of 'death by powerpoint'.
A big issue was the number of abbreviations and jargon thrown around. Most people probably don't realise they do it, and it certainly speeds up information transfer once everyone knows them, but it increased the initial learning curve dramatically.
It may not be immediately obvious, but learning so many names and faces at once was also a challenge. With all the other info being fired at me, I sometimes had to ask for introductions more than once.
Tech learning curve
Fortunately, the tech learning curve wasn't as steep initially - at least in the first week or two. I started off with a fairly simple project - developing an anonymous online forum for employees to raise questions with senior management. I chose to use PHP, since that was the web language I was most familiar with. However, I soon ran into some hurdles - developing behind the corporate proxy was one, working on a windows machine another. It took a while to get my environment set up similar enough to the Macbook I'd been using for the past 5+ years, but thanks to Cmder, Atom and the http_proxy environment variable I eventually got into the groove.
I was also blazing a trail with some of my work on OpenShift. A decent part of my role focuses on setting up this internal PaaS as a production service, so I was deploying apps, writing scripts, and integrating with databases - things that our customers wanted but no-one had attempted before. This was amazing fun, but did lead to some days of frustration when the environment was unstable.
While a large part of my dayjob remained working on OpenShift, I quickly moved on to learn new web technologies and new platforms - check my post where I tell the story of [how I learned Node.js and ran a 90-minute webinar in one week]!
Now
I'd say it took me 3-4 months to feel fully comfortable in my role, and ramp up to full speed. That isn't to stay I stopped learning - every day brings a fresh challenge.
Comparing myself now to myself at the start of the year, I'm amazed. My confidence has been vastly increased, my technical abilities have come on in leaps and bounds, and my business skills are also much better. It's been a great year so far, and I think I've built a fantastic foundation to continue learning and growing. Here's to the rest of the year and the future!