Recount of my first day in the office:
I’m sitting in South Station, the Grand Central of Boston, rightly lacking “grand” in its title. This is the train station nearest to my internship. Knowing myself as a chronic late arriver, I woke up 2.5 hours before I had to arrive, and I was able to leave 1.25 hours before I had to arrive. This meant that with 15 stops on the T(train), I still had about a half hour to walk to my destination. Nothing calms my nerves like simple math. I check my inbox on my phone and find a message from my soon-to-be boss. She asks if we can meet at Starbucks at 10:30 instead of in the office at 10. I say a silent prayer to the little person on my shoulder who suggested I buy my first smart phone this week. These things are clutch.
My just-purchased Au Bon Pain latte and I walk to Starbucks. I have supported Starbucks enough to feel only mildly bad about my rude behavior. I sit down, and thought out my next plan of action. I have 15 minutes. I am currently reading Sebastian Seung’s book. Will it look staged if I am perched with it when my boss arrives? Will I merely look psyched to begin? Will she scoff at the fact that I haven’t already read it? Whatever, that is what I’m currently reading, I will read it. She arrives and does not notice the cover, but is friendly as ever.
We walk to the office where she explains the project I will be working on during my time at EyeWire. I will be designing a “curriculum” for high school and middle school teachers to use when they want to bring neuroscience into their classroom. Teachers around the world had used EyeWire as a prop while teaching a neuroscience unit, but they didn’t always contact EyeWire about their use. It was unclear how many teachers had used EyeWire in the classroom, and how successful their experience had been. The biggest indicator of classroom use was the cascade of underage hooligans that flooded the EyeWire chatroom with profanity during the weeks following their lessons. A useful way to track when EyeWire was in the classroom this was, but maybe there was a better way to track this. Instead there could be an official webpage where teachers could record their experience. So my “curriculum” would be this webpage- this is the place where I would post links to helpful neuroscience content on the web for use in classrooms, and teachers would post further resources and lesson plans they had designed. This sounded like an awesome project, but I had never designed a webpage before. Guess I gotta learn how to do that.
My boss, Amy, and I spent time watching youtube videos from educational channels. We watched on one of the ~8 computer monitors in the office that I would be sharing with Amy and two others. This particular monitor was a massive TV screen. Amy encouraged me to use the youtube video’s content in my webpage. To the right you will find some of the channels with cool content.
As noon approached, my other office mates arrived. They are the company’s developers(coders): Will and Chris. Around noon two EyeWire women from the office down the hall join us. Everyone formed a casual circle and one at a time explained what they were working on. I had a flashback to spring break, outdoor ed trips and leader 1 training. Check-ins. I know this! They are playing professional rose-bud-thorn. My hippie heart got a little fuzzy. I would learn that this “scrum” happens many times a week, and seemed to keep the tiny team unified. When the meeting finished Will excitedly mentioned that Claire was hosting a google hangout with an amazing neuroscientist, Christof Koch– we caught the tail end on the mega monitor!
Here’s a link to the hangout- watch if you have 1:44 hours to become inspired. (He used a climbing term at 1:11:30 what!?) You can also watch shorter videos of Christof’s talks on youtube.
I momentarily did some research and brainstorming for my curriculum project. Then Amy suggested we all go for Chinese. Amy, Will, Chris and I ventured to nearby Chinatown where we had a two hour long lunch break. We laughed, we talked about some computer science, we left to search for a bamboo plant to put in the office. We returned to the office around 4pm. I did a bit more brainstorming and then my first day had ended.
Wait WHAT?! I hope you are thinking something along the lines of:
“You’re telling me that the game that was recently featured on the cover of New York Times Magazine, the game that has 174,000 players, the game that gathered the data for this paper in Nature(CC gives you access thru the Tutt pg) is ‘run’ by a buncha folks that roll into the office round noon just to watch videos and then go out to eat.”
I mean that thought crossed MY mind. But as in the following days I found out that these guys start slow but worked late into the night. They are always some of the last ones to leave the building that hosts ~100 companies. They work as a team, with constant communication within the office and between the Princeton and Boston offices. They know how they work best. They all care so much about the well-being of the company so strict 9-5 schedules and productivity “inspiring” rules are unnecessary. Psych is always high. People bring work home with them, but they do so because they want to. To backtrack- this was not a typical lunch length at EyeWire but yes, everyone comes into the office around noon and the environment is casual. And I guess their hard work and style is paying off, because they’re getting recognized.
Since my first day at EyeWire I have ‘met'(over video chat) the Berkeley student that will be helping me with my project and I’ve excessively youtube binged. I’ve organized information and google searched. I’ve asked questions and listened in on many a google hangout. And I am preparing to do something with the information I’ve gathered.
My next post will be on what I’ve been working on, an opinion piece on the world of google hangouts, and some babbling about meeting Korean EyeWires.
**I looked further into Christoff Koch’s affiliation with rock climbing. He climbs a lot. And he neurosciences. *hand-fans face* This may be what love feels like.
