Summer In DC Part 1: Work!

So I have been working in DC for the past few weeks at a company called Navigant.  I’ll have this job for 8 weeks so I felt might as well write down what I do at work so I don’t forget it haha.  Overall what Navigant does is help clients with litigations and compliance.  My department is Legal Technology Solutions (LTS) so we do all that previous stuff, but with tech! Personally, I do a lot of SQL programming, but some things the other interns do is document review to see if there is anything useful to court cases in those documents.  I don’t really find that work that much interesting because it is mostly just looking at documents for hours, so I try to keep asking for SQL work. 

There are two other interns in LTS, Meaghan and Katherine.  They are also UVA students and I’m glad they are here with me. They are funny and accept my randomness haha. Whenever we are bored we can message or just turn around and talk.  Another person in our cubicle area (don’t worry I’m not boxed in; there is plenty of open space) is Emily.  She goes to Davidson and is in the Construction team, but she sits with us and completes the square haha.  She is keeping a quote sheet of all the weird things I say, which is kinda scary but also funny.

We all three have buddies.  Mine is Patrick and he is really chill.  Quiet but when he drinks he is a crazy man supposedly.  Though he is my buddy, since I keep asking for SQL projects I work more with John, Arman, and Mason (powerhouse Asian team haha).  John is like insanely chill but learned coding at work, but he always makes sure we are ok so he is a good guy.  Arman is super intense programmer and likes to give speeches about thinking in a “database perspective” haha.  I should really learn a lot from him before I leave.  Mason is higher than them two I think and is cool (I’ll talk about the social life stuff in a different post). 

Was about to type about one of my projects but I am not allowed to so oh well.  I just feel lucky that I have not gotten super boring projects in LTS.  I have to keep pressuring for harder projects since it is summer and they have less work compared to usual, but I just want to learn and be helpful really.   Never expected that I would do a lot more programming than business stuff, but I probably would like this better than doing financial models I guess.  Maybe because it is new for me and I don't really have much experience in professional coding that it is interesting. 

Making others comfortable

I recently watched a video and in the end the youtuber quickly mentioned that many people spend a lot of energy trying to make other people feel comfortable.  It made me want to think about how I feel about that issue.  It seems like an ideal: always trying to make other people comfortable because you care about them.  It also seems like something that cannot be achieved. You can't always spend energy on other people. 

I know for certain groups I definitely try my best to make others feel comfortable.  I find Japanese class really fun and want everybody to be friends in it.  I want to make everybody get along and I will go out of my way to make friends with new students. I did it in Japan and I did it at UVA as well.  So in some situations I definitely do it, but others times I just want to feel comfortable myself and push others to make me feel that way.

This sorta relates to why people spend all this energy on others like this.  Sometimes I feel that I’m doing it just so others can reciprocate.  I know that most people don’t expect too much from me in these terms, but I still I seem to expect a lot of people.  I worry that me spending energy on others makes me expect that others will try to make me comfortable too.  What happens if the actions I do that I think are meaningful for others are not, and then I start to expect stuff that I never deserved?  Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I see it happening.  For example, if I do something for somebody that I consider considerate but that person doesn't, then I can't expect that person to do something considerate for me since in that person's eyes I have done nothing.  My usual way to mitigate this is to understand somebody or just ask them, but that also requires time.  

Maybe I want to make others comfortable to make myself comfortable.  Maybe I have empathy because I have been in situations without friends and I don’t like seeing others suffer it.  Hard to say but an interesting question I got posed.