I learned some fascinating things about organizational psychology and how people and spaces are shaped by one another. I learned how profoundly the identity of a place is determined by the extent to which its values are made action. I learned that there are intersections of subjects I’d never have thought intersected, and there are beautiful, fascinating relationships to be discovered everywhere.

This project appealed to me because it struck a chord with my educational background (psychology and writing) while remaining firmly outside of my comfort zone. The utter foreignness of this topic (I’m not sure I could have told you what workplace culture was at the start of this) ended up being the greatest growth opportunity of this project.

There’s an extent to which we all gravitate towards areas where we have some solid footing. Putting myself out there when I know I don’t know, when all I can say is “I don’t know anything, how can I help?” (what Dev Bootcamp calls exposing one’s ignorance) was nerve wracking to say the least. Learning to be comfortable with uncertainty is part and parcel for Ei; learning to be comfortable with my own uncertainty was a larger and more intimidating hurdle. But over the last 3 months I’ve helped assess and research a topic I didn’t known existed, started work on a documentary (after googling how to use a camera and frame shots), conducted my first interview (and then 20 more), and thrown myself into a bootcamp where every single day I’m asked to build something out of a technology I’ve never heard of. So I’d say I’m making progress.

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