Reflect upon starting at ThoughtWorks

Prompt: Take a look back and reflect upon starting at ThoughtWorks. What were some things that enhanced your experience and what left you with more questions? Were there unexpected turns, and did you see yourself change with them?

Rebecca Lau

I recall coming in on my first day at Thoughtworks, and being floored that sitting around the table with me were more females than males (each with a different personality, as I later found out). It was just an observation at the time, but as I work and compare my experience as a CS major in school, versus learning at Thoughtworks, I find that this diversity has made an enormous difference in how I feel on a day-to-day basis. Why? Perhaps I cannot, or should not, point at a singular reason.

Still, I can remember sitting in a CS class, thinking over all my questions thrice in order to make sure they weren’t stupid so people wouldn’t judge me (and somehow, judge all the other people who shared my gender but weren’t in the room). A lot of the time I ended up not asking the question, or I would save it for later, when I could send an impersonal e-mail or meet the professor one-on-one in office hours (but only if I had previously developed a good relationship with the professor in the first place).

While I’ve been at Thoughtworks, I think about what I want to say- but I am no longer afraid to seem ignorant, and this has helped me fill in the gaps in my knowledge base. I cannot point to anything that caused me to consistently feel this way at school. But I also cannot deny that it was there, and now it isn’t. Have I changed, or is it just the environment around me that has changed? It may be impossible for me to tell, but at the very least, I am more confident in my opinions and words today.

Ariel Flaggs

When I first started at TW I was not really sure what I had even signed up for, but I was ready to give it my best. That was easier said than done. Although, I was putting in the effort I did not know what I was doing. Going through the TW101 course work I felt I was missing the mark. My learning coach always offered steps for improvement, which helped to put my mind at ease some. However, when the week ended before heading off to India I was starting to doubt myself. I beat myself up that I was not learning fast enough. I was not used to struggling to grasp concepts and ideas and I did not like this feeling. I went off to TWU with the mindset that it is ok to fail. I am not sure I fully believed this, but I went with it. Once at TWU that’s exactly what I did. Not failed necessarily, well I hope not, but saw each opportunity as a learning experience. In time I beat myself up less and less. I am now much more comfortable with not knowing and learning as I go. Quieting the negative voice in your head can be hard, but has reduced the amount of stress I feel on a daily basis and allowed me to take it one step at a time.

Alyssa Nabors

Going into my first few weeks at ThoughtWorks, I felt like I was reliving my freshman year of college in a lot of ways. It was expected that I would go wrong in some ways, and there were people in place to implement course corrections. The people around me were just as new as I was, and so even though our knowledge and experience levels were hugely different, we were able to face our new experiences with a wonderfully comforting sense of camaraderie. Especially considering that many of us were new to Chicago, and that we’d be the only people we knew going to India, we were able to form friendships quickly.

I’ve been really grateful for those friendships as we worked through TWU and the weeks since. It’s a lot easier to ask friends for help, and to trust friends to give you honest feedback with the motivation of helping you improve rather than from a place of spite or malice. Friends make coming to work a happier thing, even on bad days. The biggest problem for me is that despite this collegiate atmosphere and these new and close relationships, ThoughtWorks is still my job. It’s a job that I love, but it is sometimes difficult to know where the good balance between professionalism and the typical TW casual attitude is until you’ve tipped too far one way or the other.