Week 4. Post 2.

Overcoming Challenges

An internship provides many learning opportunities, but it has its challenges as well. On Friday, we had an internal demo of the project I have been working on. However, when I looked at the code in the morning, the recent changes caused test failures. I was surprised and got a bit nervous. I knew I had to come up with a plan to bring the code to a functional state. I already had to-do items for that morning. Not only I already had other tasks to do for that morning, but also the error itself seemed to deal with the Git repository bug that I cannot fix in an hour. What I thought in my mind:" Why is it happening to me now right before the demo presentation?! What my mentor is going to think about me now?!". I came to this internship with the assumption that I have to perform perfectly all the time and can't have any failures. This experience taught me how to realize that not always everything will go smoothly. Being a perfectionist myself, often I get very angry when something goes off the rails. Sometimes it is very hard for me to accept certain failures as it puts me in a vulnerable position in my life which forces me into the mindset of "everything should go perfectly, otherwise, I am not good enough".  With this experience, I realized that not always everything will go perfectly as you were planning and at that moment you need to learn how to quickly adapt to stressful situations. I quickly contacted my co-worker to ask if he will be able to demo by himself and helped him out with how to plan out our presentation without demoing my work. Next time, when I face a stressful situation like this, I will try to follow the rule of "deep breath", where I would take 1 minute meditating; and only once I am calm down, start reprioritizing/reorganizing my tasks and steps I can take to adapt to new situations.