Week 1 as an Applied Scientist
How it's going, things I learned, things I wish I knew and things I am looking forward to next week
HAPPY MONTH OF LOVE, ♥️ girls and guys (ya’ll / ladies / gentlemen, whatever it is that you prefer) !! Now that the cheesiness and the pleasantries are out of the way, here is a quick introduction of this newsletter for those of you who are new (quite a few of you):
📆 this newsletter is currently very sporadic (although I am hoping that will change this week and I can be more regular now that I have a day-ly schedule.)
🤪 it is a very unfiltered account of what I am up to, and any recommendations I may have / answers to FAQs, hence it has a very informal tone
💌 you can hit reply to this email to get in touch directly with me or if you have questions - it is the easiest & quickest way to get my attention
How its going
This week was rough - and I am anticipating the next few to feel the same. Impostor syndrome is hitting me HARD 😓 and despite telling myself “you will be okay in due time” - it doesn't really feel that way right now so I am extremely sulky 🤓 I started as an Applied Scientist at Microsoft Bing Maps on February 1, 2021. I interned with the same team in Spring 2020, so my impression was that my remote-onboarding will be easier than that of the other new-grads.
FALSE. NOT TRUE. Nope. 0. 404 not found.
Things I learned
🏋🏻♂️ It was hard!! Even though I knew everyone in my team already (except one person who joined right after I completed my internship), I realized in the first meeting itself how lost I am. During my internship, the project I worked on was extremely siloed, so much that I didn’t work with any data that the team owned or any tools that the team used. Moreover, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the projects that other people were working on at the time, hence, making me very unaware right now. 🥵 Bad move, bad intern, Akriti.
🥺 Secondly, getting introduced to people is hard online. You know what’s even harder?Asking questions in meetings because there’s already a level of difficulty to be reached to hold effective meetings online. I have struggled all week to ask for the meeting to be paused so I can ask a question such that the rest of the meeting will make a little more sense to me than if I don’t ask the question.
😲 Last, it is impossible to maintain a 9-5 schedule if you don’t actively try for it. At least for me, waking up early is a task. 😴 I am not a morning person however hard I try to be one. So if I don’t have to commute or turn on my camera during the day, I can very easily wake up late and start working at the time my first meeting starts. Similarly, there is no end to the day - you can easily get lured into working much later than you’d like simply because you’re in the zone (IYKYK)
Things I wish I knew
😆Pay more attention as an intern - you never know what you will be coming back to do. I really truly wish I asked more questions during my internship - it was my first experience, I was shy, I was extremely under-confident and remote-work started half-way into my internship. But that’s no excuse - my second internship was fully remote and I think I had learned my lesson by then. I asked a lot more questions, got a lot more answers and understood things much better, much more quickly.
😎The understanding of the business and the product is as important as the understanding of the feature you will individually be working on. I am a very head-on-implementation-get-shit-done kind of a person, and sometimes, that makes me lose the big picture (most of the times). I wish I knew all the questions I should have asked in the first week -
where is the revenue coming from?
who are the biggest stakeholders?
where the product going? what is the product roadmap?
why is the product important?
who owns what?
I am not sure I am covering everything here, but I will make sure to update this as and when I remember more questions. I started asking these questions on Friday, effectively wasting my 1:1s in the first 4 days.
Things I am looking forward to next week
☕️ My brother, very kindly, let me borrow his percolate to make my morning coffee. I have been drinking an average of 4 shots of Nespresso coffee the last week, and honestly, I don’t think it is enough. I am hoping that the stronger brew from the percolate will make me feel better and get me more focussed.
1️⃣ More 1:1s!! I have slowly gotten the hang of how to schedule 1:1s with people in my team and my sister team, and the questions I want to ask, things I want to / need to know, like those mentioned above and some others like:
what does a day in your life look like?
what is the best way to reach you?
how can I ask you questions?
what projects are you working on?
Questions obviously vary depending on who I am talking to and how senior they are in the team, but I think this is a good overview.
🥱More questions!! I have been preaching the importance of asking questions but believe me, I don’t think I am practicing it enough. I have the worse fear of “sounding stupid” when I ask a question - but I am slowly letting go of it because I know my growth will be exponential if I let go of that fear 🏋🏻♂️ the worst part is that every time I have a question, I tend to think - “is this something that I am supposed to know? or is this common knowledge? or is this a good enough question to ask?” My goal for next week is to ask at least 3 out of 5 questions that I come up with. Another really great tip that I got was to ping a team-mate with the question on chat if I am nervous about asking on call - and then either take it offline or the team mate can take the opportunity to answer it during the call.
🥳 I have also designated 5.30pm as my walk/workout time. Considering I live in a city where it is raining all the time, going out for a walk is not always very inviting. But on days that I can, I try to use it as my “commute” time to get away from work life, and into life-life. It was raining 3/5 work days last week and on those days, I got a quick 20 minute workout in. I am hoping to continue this next week and see where it goes. I am sure I will have to be flexible when my workload increases but I am determined to maintain boundaries (@ me in a couple of weeks 🤪)
Failures of this week
Someone commented on one of my posts on Instagram this week they feel like they are under-achieving in their lives after looking at my feed, leading to mental health issues but they come back for a dose of motivation every now and then. 🙂 It has been a journey and a half for me to start sharing my life in public, and not getting affected by the kind of comments I get (and sometimes, don’t get). 🥸And it is not always possible for me to share my failures without feeling shame but here goes nothing - My reading goal for 2021 is 21 books and 1 month in, I have only finished a third of my first read. I woke up at 6 am only 2 days out of 5 last week. I have been stuck on my coursera course for 3 weeks and for some or the other reason, I am unable to get back to it. Annnnd I am struggling with the 100DaysChallenge - its busy juggling work and onboarding and documentations and life and social media accountability.
I am nowhere close to perfect, and I will never claim to be. 🤓 But what I am is a lifelong learner, and my goal everyday is to be a little bit better than I was yesterday in the hope that the incremental wins will have big returns one day. 😊
Thanks for spending your Sunday with me.
See you next week (hopefully!)