Week 1: First Impressions
Today marks the end of my first week at my first ever (official) internship. I’m first greeted by a cohort of 37 other interns, most of which are from New Jersey and are incoming juniors/seniors (just like me!). I was surprised by how social everyone was, and the complete normalcy with which I could approach a stranger and ask them about their background, interests, and hobbies. With this culture in place, I was able to easily meet a great group of people, all of which were eager to get to know each other and kickstart their summer internship experience.
Our orientation period is largely characterized by general onboarding activities: setting up our laptops, slide introductions, an office tour, games to get to know other interns (2 truths & a lie, intern bingo), and informational sessions on Merck’s mission and resources. We had the chance to meet current ETRs (Merck’s rotational program for recent full-time hires), who were previous interns. Hearing them speak about their own internships experiences was particularly helpful for me, as I quickly understood the importance of taking advantage of Merck’s network. In fact, I hypothesize that drawing from the experiences of the company’s diverse employees might pose an equal, if not greater, learning opportunity than my technical project itself.
After orientation, our cohort splits into their various teams and divisions across Merck’s entire IT department. I’m told I’m working as an Infrastructure Engineer in Merck’s Chief Technology Office (CTO), specifically within the HyperAutomation & AI team. What does that exactly entail? No clue (yet!). I’m lucky enough to have another intern working on the same team as me, and we very quickly learn to collaborate as unit to coordinate our first manager meeting. He briefs us on two potential projects, one involving a Python script, and the other being an observability task. Do I fully understand them? Not even close.
My first interaction with my team is in our “Daily Scrum” call. It’s essentially a Microsoft Teams call we have each morning where every member of our team reports to our manager about their progress in the past work day. This is also the place where people can speak up about issues that they’re having on their particular assignment, to the hope that our manager/fellow team member can offer a point of contact for further support. The meetings are fairly organized, with each team member having a separate task board to screen share and iterate through. From my first three days on this team, I mainly sit in and try to follow the repetitive yet complex vocabulary exchanged between team members. Safe to say I’m super confused.
My fellow intern, Tanvi, and I are given a few “KT sessions” on our 4th day, after having been introduced to our team and general purpose of our projects. KT stands for Knowledge Transfer. We had a handful of 1–1 calls with different members of our team, who broke down the complexity of several different technologies. I’m realizing how technically “baked” the work is — it seemed like every technology getting explained to us depends on 4–5 other technologies that require more KT sessions. Lots of learning involved!
One thing that surprised me was how freeform the days are; besides the few meetings that popped up on our calendar, the interns have free reign to come and go into the office as they please, as well as eat/drink/socialize whenever they see fit. Being my first week and all, I’ve completely taken up the liberty of indulging in this flexibility, having lunch with other interns consistently, engaging in an perpetual state of yap. My team is unfortunately entirely remote, so I missed out on the opportunity of getting to break bread with them, but there are so many more people I’m looking forward to meeting!
Week 1 Takeaways/Objectives:
- Networking is a crucial part of the learning experience. If you ask for help/advice, people regard it with the utmost sincerity, so learn to lean into that.
- Internships are what you make of them — you can choose to take advantage of your flexibility and not produce any real output, or you can demonstrate interest/motivation and really push forward some neat progress for the company.
- Corporate terms: KT (knowledge transfer) & moving the needle.
- I LOVE ADJUSTABLE DESKS.
- I don’t understand the Corporate America stigmatization. It’s flexible, social, and rewarding. Maybe it’s just gatekept (?). I guess I’ll find out eventually.
Looking forward to the next 8 weeks! I could get used to this.
