Quotes from Michael’s address:
That is what makes me so excited about the presentation today. I get to see what you have already done. What you have accomplished with the STEM-Away approach. If you are interviewing, nothing more powerful than I have done real work, here are the results.
You guys went through a ton of the tools that are used as standard practice. Open source communities, Github, Scripting languages in general. As well as your conversation on Agile. That experience of the internship is just irreplaceable. I could put it into a book. You guys can now write your own book and go: Until you experience it, you don’t have the tangible feel for the challenges of communicating, researching and still being productive.
When Kristen said she is going back to the workforce, I was like being a mom is a really tough job and you are shifting career goals perhaps but you have never stopped working.
I think one of the biggest challenges is communication, it is communicating the narrative so that everyone understands why they are doing it and not just what they are doing. When you only understand what you are doing, you need to be managed. When you understand why you are doing it, you build in your own flexibility into how you get the work done.
I can tell by the amount of work you have done in such a short summer is quite impressive. And the fact that your teams are global, many people do not have global experience until they are mature in their careers. So, you guys are ahead of the race. And from Kristen’s comments, it is clear that this platform serves as a way to gain actual experience to bring you to the edge of technology.
This is not just an internship for students in college, it is an internship for anyone who wants to come up to the state of the art quickly. It is great to see the diversity of players on the platform.