My internship with Grok

By Satheekaa Palany

I was never one to be drawn towards the inner workings of machines, nor did I feel the need to step into the world of computer science, much less learn its language. Yet, here I am.

How I ended up at Grok

For my 3rd year of biomedical science, I was afforded the opportunity to take up a unit that reviewed our compatibility with the workforce. In short, it targeted employability skills. As part of the program, I was required to, well, be employed. So I put forth my application into the Monash database where companies would look at prospective interns. One that happened to find me was Grok.

I started researching the organisation, trying to understand their outlook and vision for their company. The more I learnt, the more interested I became. The word Grok means to learn intuitively, and that was something I quite lived by. I tended to learn from my surroundings and environment without having a step-wise approach, a rather unconventional manner but effective nonetheless. Grok seemed to relate to that. Of course, all this wouldn't matter if i didn't get past the interview stage and thankfully I did.

Rolling up my sleeves

One of the first tasks I was meant to do was brain storm what my main project would be and to complete a couple Grok courses. The first one was the Python’s beginner course.

Let’s just say, when people say coding is a language, trust me, that’s not a manner of speech.

Truth be told, coding was complex. My saving grace were the interactive steps and the active learning induced by questions at every point. This made learning the beginning of python relatively easy. It took time, yes, but the steps were straight forward and easy to follow, making the process a lot less arduous then I’d originally thought it’d be. Not to mention, I was learning the programming language that I technically use everyday — spotify, google, instagram - you name it, they use it.

Click the image to give the course a go yourself.

Sitting in meetings and completing the courses gave me a couple ideas. Many of which evolved around student engagement and relaying the importance of computer science.

I got to work, creating engaging posts, articles, and the likes. I applied my pre-existing knowledge from biomedical science and the new addition of information technology towards relaying the importance of coding in Covid. Whilst doing so and creating other activities for teachers and students, I was pushed into looking at the classroom though their perspective… so I added my own spin to the emails.

Almost every kid knows Star Wars.

The GIF was designed and inserted into the Week 1 NCSS competition emails to keep the students engaged and excited.

Additionally, who wouldn't be interested in will.i.am and ̶J̶o̶n̶ John Snow?

This video was created to display how data was all around us and to entice viewers into the realm of computer science.

Two steps forward, one step back

In order for me to truly surmise my experience, I first needed to take a step back and reflect on this internship. Eventually, I realized I enjoyed the work I did because I believed the result could make a difference. Granted, all work can get tedious. In those moments, I imagine I was motivated by equal parts of aiming to achieve a good result, as well as the belief that I could produce a result effective enough for people to see the importance of computer science.

In terms of employability, I got to test out different skills — communication, planning, and patience to name a few — while producing my projects. I do think that I had these qualities to varying extents before, but being placed into a work environment has allowed me to enhance them intuitively.

All in all, I trust I grokked it.