Three things I learned from a remote internship

I secured an internship at Bose Corporation at the end of February. Then March hit, and my school had a confirmed case of COVID.

I secured an internship at Bose Corporation at the end of February. Then March hit, and my school had a confirmed case of COVID; four days later I was back home on the other side of the country, told that the semester would be online and remote. Bose emailed us in May with hopes for an in-person internship, and weeks later, they reached out with a pledge to honor their program virtually when many other employers left students and recent grads out to dry. I’m immensely grateful I had the opportunity to work at Bose this summer — and their response to the pandemic at large was empathetic, a thread I found interwoven in many facets of company culture.

Prior to the beginning of the internship, I received multiple boxes in the mail — a laptop, a monitor, a keyboard and mouse. Then a welcome gift — some wireless headphones and a Getting Started packet with phones numbers, links, and emails for any resource we might require. Everything needed for the perfect at-home setup and onboarding experience.

Bose Week 1: I learned from the get-go that the core value at Bose is to help everyone reach their fullest human potential. The interns went through some fantastic brand training that made me understand exactly why some people have been at Bose for a decade or more. My mentor spent time explaining the importance of taking the extra leap to meet people in the virtual workplace. Normally, I would have been able to walk around, say hello, and familiarize myself with different teams in the office; now it was more important than ever to schedule 1:1 meetings with people.

As the summer progressed, I saw what working within the Health Division at a large company entailed. I worked on a new medical device and split my time between Human Factors Engineering and User Research. Coming from a previous role in consulting, it was interesting to see different divisions of labor, the reliance on others to accomplish tasks (simple to complex) and how even a small delay can shift timelines dramatically. From the outset of my internship, I felt like a part of the Bose family. I was invited to team meetings, happy hours, and met with colleagues and others across the company. I was trusted to complete pivotal work; my most valuable contribution was the Known Use Problems Analysis for the FDA 510K submission. And while I was originally supposed to work in Health for the duration of the summer, I switched into Consumer Electronics for the last third of my internship to increase my exposure to different types of research and ended up contributing to Bose’s efforts to improve processes, designing a new template for comfort and stability test plans.

While chaos is the name of the game in 2020, I was able to find some calm this summer, taking time to meet people across the company and learn about other opportunities that exist in my future. I had fantastic conversations about research, but more importantly about Bose’s ongoing transformation from an engineering-focused corporation to one that values well-designed experiences. I walked away from this internship with a few thoughts:

1. “Whatever you do, do it 100% with full passion.”
2. “Remain curious; don’t become wedded to ideas, but to the outcome.” There are always going to be many ways get from A to Z, I saw many times how people must change strategies due to business or product constraints.
3. “Customers now know what good design and usability look like and they expect to be part of the design process.”

I hope our paths cross again, Bose!