SERIES / MY ATLASSIAN INTERNSHIP
New beginnings: hello Atlassian!
This summer, I’ll be interning with Atlassian’s Migration Platform Team as a Content Designer (and yes, I’m still learning what half this sentence means ☺)️.
After many months of anticipation, November finally came around and this week, I started as a content design intern at a company that has consistently ranked as one of the ‘Great Places to Work’ in Australia. I’ve just wrapped up my first week and this short blog post is going to be the first of what I hope to be weekly recaps of what I’ve been up to and personal reflections.
Of course, this journey started long before this week and I may write about my application process at some point. But today, allow me to bask in the excitement (and a great deal of confusion) of my very first internship!
Any opinions expressed are my own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Atlassian.
Diving in: saying yes and figuring it out later
Some context: I don’t have a STEM or business background and I didn’t know what Atlassian was until I applied to this internship at the start of the year. I also didn’t know what their products were until I was invited to an interview and I thought it would be a good idea to try and figure it out (still figuring it out).
The week began with almost 100 interns, across Australia and New Zealand, calling in to our virtual orientation day. In the morning, most of us self-onboarded our shiny, new MacBooks and with that done, it was time to kick off day one. The agenda covered an overview of the company’s history, mission and values in the morning, and by afternoon, we had gotten to know some fellow interns, had lunch with our managers, sat in a Q&A with recent grads at the company who were also previous interns and ended the day with a payroll induction.
As overwhelming as the day might have been for a lot of us, I took comfort in the first tip we were given at the beginning of the day: say yes, then figure out the how. It’s almost certain there will be opportunities we will feel unsure about — or outright inadequate for — but as long as we have the courage to say yes to them, even as interns, then figuring out how is just a matter of time and attitude.
Which was a much-needed reminder as not only was this my first foray into the tech space, I come to Atlassian with no technical background. It was a real shock when the interns created a group chat earlier this month and immediately began talking programming (I think?) as icebreakers… LOL. I think something like half the intern cohort are developers, engineers, or data scientists. I’ve been told I’ll find people across the company in the same boat as me (in fact, I already have!) but it doesn’t make the daily experience of working in a tech company any less daunting.
You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.
Having said that, I’m optimistic. Someone (Zig Ziglar) once said, “you don’t have to be great at something to start, but you have to start to be great at something.” With that in mind, Atlassian is probably the best place for me to be right now, and I can’t wait to immerse myself into the rest of this internship.
The rest of the week flew by: I started to learn about migrations, which is the team I will be joining, sat in on design critique/sparring sessions, “brown bag sessions”, and had a handful of 1:1s to meet some key mentors I will be learning from. There was also plenty to read courtesy of the “firehose”, a tongue-in-cheek nickname for the company’s collaborative workspace/wiki.
That just about sums up my first week, but I can’t sign off without thanking the awesome campus recruiters and my manager who have been the cornerstone of my intern experience so far. I’m grateful to be in their hands.
Other selected highlights
Intro blogs
Everyone who joins Atlassian is asked to write a blog by way of introducing themselves. While there’s tips to crafting a good intro, there’s certainly no rules. I thought this was such a creative way of getting to know firstly my cohort, but also the wider company, when it’s just not practical to set up a chat with everyone (pandemic or not).
Customer feedback
On my second day, an email came into my inbox with a random selection of customer and user feedback. “You’re the only person in all of Atlassian to read this lot,” it read, “feeling our users experience helps us all prioritise work that increases customer happiness and reduces customer pain.” I’m not sure if this is the standard in software companies (or generally, any customer-facing company); if it is, that’s awesome, and if not, I appreciate what Atlassian has done here.
One of the core values at Atlassian is “don’t f#ck the customer”, and it was encouraging to see this embedded in practice.
On a side note, orientation made me fall in love Atlassian’s values even more. While it’s easy for any company to pick nice-sounding words and post them as values, Atlassian takes it a step further. Our values are not words; our values are action-oriented attributes that don’t leave any room for doubt about what our people can expect from each other.
Intern social events
Shoutout to the campus team who have been so proactive and enthusiastic in organising virtual social events for the interns in light of the remote arrangement. 💗
If you liked what you read here, check out the second post in my internship blog series!
