Week 6: Culture

Hello again!

This week i’d like to elaborate more on Vigilant’s company culture. I noted in previous posts that Vigilant is a lifestyle company which provides a lot of flexibility. Us employees are allowed to make our own hours with he only conditions being that we be available for e-mail/phone calls from 1-5, work 40 hours a week, and attend meetings when scheduled. As you can probably imagine the meetings are very casual and most communication throughout the company is informal. I personally had a hard time assimilating into the company culture since I was taught from a young age a way to communicate with your superiors and Vigilant was asking me to do the complete opposite. Nonetheless, I love the laid back culture. The loose culture takes the fear of asking questions completely out of the picture which helps me feel more relaxed in the work environment and ultimately leads to more productivity and learning from me.

Per usual I would like to close with a highlight from my work week. After our success in creating hacks last week this week we began working on a simulator so we can more easily test hacks. For the simulation I was tasked to create a GUI, graphical user interface, for it. Prior to this I had never created a GUI, nor did I ever plan to. However, after creating the GUI for the simulator I realized that might be something that I would be interested in upon graduation. That moment was so great to me because I was very close to not taking the task of creating the GUI. As I said before I had never done it, nor did I really want to for I feared I may fail. I then thought back to when I was on the San Francisco Career Trek and Adam Ward told me don’t be afraid to fail during an internship for your main goal is to learn and you’ll never learn if you stay in your comfort zone. I now see the light in his words as when I ventured out of my comfort zone I learned something that may change my career path forever.

Until next week,

Kyle