Reflecting on 2022 Summer Internships

Every year Lucid takes on a large number of interns across departments. We asked three interns from our Summer 2022 cohort—Amelia Ward, Customer Operations; Sriraag Govardha, Product Management; and Jaden Peterson, Software Engineering—to reflect on their internship experience from this year:

What has been the most surprising part of your internship?

Amelia: I’ve been most surprised by how much I’ve been able to learn in a short time about Lucid, and the amount of interaction I’ve been able to have with many different teams. I’ve had the opportunity to get to know and work with other teams aside from my own, which has been a great learning experience for me and offered great context to my role and how I fit into company processes and workflows. Lucid has offered me a great onboarding experience and opportunities to learn about the company goals and culture by being invited to company updates and other activities. 

Sriraag: I would love to give you a not-so-cliche answer, but with all honesty, every day has been a new surprise and a different experience than the previous one. A large part of it comes from my role as a product manager intern. At Lucid, we care deeply about our users’ experiences and empathize with their problems. We have a very sincere approach to understanding and solving innovative problems for our customers and in this process, I get to meet a lot of people. I’m constantly amazed by the people and their stories. Everyone here from the executive team to your pathfinder is approachable, extremely helpful, and truly believes that we win as a team. When I speak to our users, I see how passionate they are to work with us because they believe we can make their experience with the products better. It’s this culture of trust, empathy, and ownership that I haven’t seen in many places before.

Jaden: From a technical perspective, the difference between engineering a solo personal project and contributing to a product with hundreds of teammates was astonishingly apparent. Decisions are made much more precisely with regard to user experience; best practices are recorded explicitly and expected to be consistently enforced. As scale increases, so does the number of safeguards against introducing sub-par code into production. Regular communication with QA, thorough code review, and testing locally in a staging environment and in preproduction were all a part of my day-to-day.

All of this required occasional notetaking and constant deliberation when collaborating with other teams and departments. A rigorous education could’ve hardly prepared me for the soft skills I’d gain at Lucid.

What was the best part of your internship?

Amelia: The best part of my internship has been working with great team members! Everyone I’ve met has been so great to work with and have taught me so much throughout my time here. I’ve also loved working with customers, and helping them by answering their questions or assisting them in troubleshooting issues to help them be successful while using Lucid products.

Sriraag: Undoubtedly the week we were all flown into Salt Lake City, to the HQ for the hackathon and H2 Rendezvous! This being my first hackathon experience at Lucid, I came in with few expectations. I was just looking forward to meeting my team and other interns in person, and having a fun-filled week. But I was pleasantly surprised at how eagerly people were waiting for this and how supportively competitive everyone was. 

It was three days full of adrenaline rush, which culminated in a showdown on Day 4 when we all went around talking to people about our project and convincing them to vote for us. After work, I got a chance to hang out with my team and we did lots of fun activities together while exploring the city (My manager, Katie Menzies, gives amazing food place recommendations). I could go on talking about how much fun that week was!

Jaden: By far, Hackathon and the post-Hackathon Rendezvous were the most exciting parts of my internship. For Hackathon, we were flown to Salt Lake City, a city to which I’d never been and in which I engaged with more talented, passionate, and uplifting people in one building than I ever had before.

For three days (which felt longer to those who opted not to sleep), our team of nearly all interns worked continuously to bring an idea from conception to something usable and valuable. Although prioritizing presentability above all else meant cutting some corners, it revealed the importance of effectively delegating tasks and fostering an encouraging and driven, yet comfortable team environment.

Contrary to how I may describe it, Hackathon didn’t exclusively involve scarfing down donuts and typing away. Every day, I had the opportunity to play ping-pong, climb the rock wall, or socialize with coworkers both native to Utah and working across the continent, all of whom shared a fascinating and unique perspective.

What have you learned that you will carry with you into the rest of your career?

Amelia: This internship offered me such a great opportunity to learn more about the tech industry as a whole and the variety of roles available. It’s also given me a chance to see a great company culture and identify what I value within companies that I want to work for in the future. I’ve loved seeing how all the Lucid teams work together and getting the chance to work with some of them myself. Thank you, Lucid team!

Sriraag: One of the main reasons I chose Lucid for my internship is the values the company is built on and how deeply they are ingrained in everyone and everything we do here. These are the things like “Teamwork over ego,” “Innovation in all we do,” “Individual ownership,” and “Passion and excellence,” which seem pretty simple but are very profound. In the last couple of months, I have witnessed how these values help us build world-class products for our customers and propel us towards the goal of enabling every knowledge worker on this planet with the power of visual collaboration. I truly believe that this set of values will be my biggest takeaway from this internship and would help me define my working style and influence the culture wherever I go. 

Jaden: Unlike many companies which often overwork talent and fabricate internal competition to drive home a result, Lucid introduced me to the value of “Teamwork over ego.” Throughout my internship, every question I had was consistently meant with a prompt, helpful, and lighthearted response—often from those outside of my Scrum team—which increased my productivity drastically.

Furthermore, Lucid’s dependence on initiative—an ingredient for the fast pace we set—can be attributed primarily to everyone being of equal status. This was exemplified by my team lead often working on the same project as me, and our CTO casually playing board games in the post-Hackathon resort banquet room with ordinary engineers.