Week 6. Post 1.

How do you communicate with other group members? What communication tools did you use? What new tools did you learn to use? How well did they work (or not) to meet your communication goals?

Most of the time me and my team communicate in Slack. There we have different channels - one for the whole team, one for only my mentor and two interns and the other is just direct messages. On top of that, we use Google Meets and Google Calendar for our meetings and planning. The tool I like the most is the Jira platform, where we post our tasks and assign them to each person and put deadlines for them. 

I knew Slack before coming to this internship, however, the flow of communication is much different from what I was used to. In college, I would not be able to storm professors with my questions in their direct messages on Slack. Thus, I came to this internship with the mindset that I should not be asking too many questions. However, the communication in the channel at my internship turned out to be very active and informal. 

My first reaction to this was very surprising. Coming to this internship, I was scared that in case I have questions then how I am going to address them. Therefore, at the beginning of the internship, I was not active in communicating since I was used to a more formal type of communication and it felt to be a little weird.  After spending some time communicating in Slack, I got an insight that the communication in the channel is pretty informal and you can ask as many questions as you want. Later, I realized that I shouldn't be scared to dive into a new environment and explore what is there. I could have started communicating more actively much earlier if I did not have these blockers in my mind of being scared to try new styles of communication. Next time, when I will come to a new project or team, I will make sure not to have blockers of being scared in my mind and try to be open to new styles of communication. I would try to ask myself questions such as: "Are you losing anything from trying new styles of communication? Is it going to harm you?" etc to make sure I am open to new things.