Week 5: Learning from mistakes

This week was a very successful based on the fact that our external user testing in New York City led to valuable feedback. On Tuesday morning, the team met at a small coffee shop near our meeting location to prepare for the days user tests. Although we were anxious and nervous of how the day would turn out, we were very much excited to be out there to show our work. We met with several professionals in various fields to show them our application and to learn more about their experiences that led to their careers. It was a wonderful opportunity to gain feedback and to learn more about their lives and the companies they worked for. I learned and took away a lot from the conversations we all had. However, the one lesson I learned that stuck the most was career paths and college education do not necessarily align. Our education can lead us down one field but it does not mean it will simply stop there. Once we are finally out in the working world, the only thing that can stop ourselves from trying new things is ourselves. I realized I should never say no to an opportunity to learn new things. It can only lead me to something better out there that I originally could never reach if I do not try.

(NYC SalesForce Meeting Room)

Also, from the very beginning of the internship, my employers emphasized the concept of being bold and not to be afraid of making mistakes. During this past week, my co-worker and I were assigned the task to contact more individuals for our external testing. For this process, we went through the LinkedIn connections of our employer and compiled a list of professional who we believed are related to our cause and could provide beneficial feedback. We drafted several outlines of emails and sent them out through LinkedIn or Gmail. However, we recently discovered from our employer that we had phrased a few words incorrectly for our population as well as not considering the legal aspects of our requests. It was a grave mistake that we had committed. Luckily, our employer was not mad but emphasized this was part of the making mistakes process and now we had to learn from it. I am extremely grateful and blessed to have this type of understanding and mentoring employer to shadow and learn from. I realize now I should always reconfirm with my employer before showing anything to public eyes as well as considering the perspective of those we are communicating with. This has been an incredible learning process and I can not wait to see what else I learn with these few remaining weeks. Hopefully, I do not make any more mistakes. If I do though, I will sure to learn from them and make sure not to commit the same thing again.