What is your extent of interaction with colleagues? Is it formal or informal or both? Does your interaction with colleagues involved topics beyond the task at hand?
Last week my mentors invited us, interns, for a lunch together outside of the office after our Friday demo presentation. We went out to eat at a very authentic restaurant in Boulder that my mentors used to go to a lot before the pandemic.
When they invited us for this lunch, I was very surprised and excited. I was shocked because I would never expect mentors to initiate such informal settings as I thought they would only always set formal settings. Usually, our conversations are both formal and informal - it depends on the task we are working on but generally, our mentors are very nice and do not put so much formality on us. My mentors joke a lot, tell us personal stories and talk with us about things outside of work too.
Before coming to this internship, I always thought that the working environment is always super formal and mentors are never reachable. I always thought that there is going to be a strict hierarchy at work that would make me feel like I can never talk to my mentors on topics outside of work. However, we had lunch without mentors and managers and it was a very nice and informal setting for conversation - I got to know my team much closer and it even made it easier for me to work with them later. I realized that having such informal settings is highly important for team building and my stereotypes about mentors were crushed. I found out that they can be informal too and there is not much formal hierarchy that they put on you during work; on the contrary, they talk to you kind of o the same level.
Next time, before having certain stereotypes in my head about certain people, I will try to objectively evaluate them and ask myself self-guiding questions such as "Where is this stereotype coming from to my mind? Is it a fair judgment to have about a certain group of people?" etc.
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