Intro

I officially possess a year’s worth of experience! (Woohoo!)

As a recent graduate, and knowing how messy the job market currently is for all of us, I believe that this is an enormous success. Therefore, I wanted to use this blog post to celebrate my wins but also share some key learnings & weaknesses I had to overcome to reach this success.

As a completely fresh grad who had zero experience, connections or internships before getting my grad scheme, I was stepping into something completely unknown. And quite frankly, very scary. My application to GSK marked my first assessment centre too (and it was a grueling 8am start…), which made the experience all the more stressful! Not to mention, if you asked 4th year Karolina what she thought about MLOps or the cloud back then, things I work with on a daily basis now, she’d look at you weird for she had no idea these things even existed.

In short, this year has been a real boost to myself both professionally and personally - and this blog will summarise some of my reflections on my first year of work, remarking on what I have learned and what I could have done better.

1. Good things come to those who wait

You will not believe me just how much I wished I had been more patient when starting out. As a natural perfectionist, but also a person who’s always super ready to contribute, having to wait for things to happen was…excruciating. I was so excited to build new things, learn new things constantly, that any period of downtime caused panic. After all, I had come from a quite competitive university, where downtime was not really a thing in the academic calendar (shoutout to Durham University and the unforgivable allnighters they made me pull sometimes), and so one of the biggest difficulties with starting work was getting adjusted to just…nothing.

Where at uni I would have been bombarded with deadline after deadline, working at a global Fortune 500 company spanning tens of timezones was oddly quiet sometimes. I say ‘oddly’ because given the setting, you’d think they wouldn’t let you sleep! Some weeks wouldn’t let me catch my breath, while some would have me spending more hours on personal development than I’d like to admit. Getting used to this variance took a lot of effort - understanding that waiting sometimes was not a weakness, or an issue on my side. It was just an emergent property of the system, and I needed to learn to use these in-between periods to explore new areas, talk to new people and acquire new knowledge.

Sometimes it was another party taking longer to resolve a problem - sometimes the project I was working on dropped in priority, and so another would take its place, and I’d need to wait. All that these would share is that it would suddenly be out of my control - and that is exactly what led me to feel stress. Because GSK was so huge, sometimes things would just happen to me, or people around me, and we would just have to accept it - and what I didn’t know is that is completely okay. Being only but a single actor in such a large system definitely taught me the value of building up resilience to random, inopportune events. It also taught me the value of getting back up, and that people are always there to help you, be it your manager or colleagues.

To allude back to patience - the lack thereof also caused me to make some amazingly poor decisions at times. Once, I was so convinced I wasn’t doing enough at work, that I pushed my team leads to give me three projects in parallel. This rightly ended in disaster, and myself not completing a single one by the end of the quarter. However, I’m very glad I was given the chance to make this mistake - having slowly evolved to be able to handle two projects a few months ago comfortably in parallel, it was incredible to realise just how much I had grown in the space of a single quarter. Major mistakes can serve as brilliant checkpoints sometimes - and while comparison is the thief of joy, comparing yourself to your previous self is nothing but a natural step in self-improvement.

2. Good things come to those who are open to new experiences

University was definitely one huge bubble. I graduated with a vague idea of wanting to pursue data science (as leetcode scared me at the time, so software engineering was a no-no!), or maybe some sort of AI, and that was the extent of what I had known. It also did not help that I joined university at the peak of COVID, and was largely forced to hang out with only other computer scientists due to social restrictions. These unique circumstances definitely made me think very narrowly of what I could be doing in the future.

Everybody was pursuing a tech position - so I thought, why not? Although I’m still keen to stay in tech, joining GSK really opened my eyes to just what sorts of jobs are out there - both in and out of tech. Through being encouraged to be curious and brave to reach out to lots of people in different business units, I quickly gained an appreciation of just how many unique teams and people really existed here. Although every one of the first fifty conversations or so with more senior employees at the company were nerve-wracking (given I thought I had nothing to offer in return as a new grad), once I got into the flow, the process became natural. Speaking to others who had called the company their second home brought me incredible insight into how things work outside of tech, and how tech interplays with all other business functions to create a very complex but functioning system.

It also taught me the value of having a snappy intro as an essential part of a personal brand, and just how much I could teach the person on the other side of the screen, despite having many decades of less experience than them! Not to mention just how much I learned as well - the value of a good mentor is not to be underestimated. Nor the value of a good eye-opening chat with one, especially on one of those really bad days.

But what started this whole section is the gratitude I have of being pushed into the unknown when I least expected it. I joined an AI/data science team for my first rotation, and was more than ready to build some real models, clean some data and see how industrial data and AI-driven processes really are like. However, my manager had a different idea - he suggested I work on MLOps instead. Given I had no idea what it was, I was not very keen - having assumed that data science was already the one for me - but my manager insisted, and said to give it a few months. ‘A growth mindset is what you need’, he said many times.

This push was possibly one of the best opportunities I had ever been given - I got to learn about cloud platforms inside-out, was mentored by our MLOps lead (huge respect for the guy btw - he’s amazing) for months which insanely improved my technical skill, and got the time to understand the necessary processes relating to deployment and data on the cloud. I learned about drift, CI/CD, performance monitoring, and so much more…I had no idea this even existed when I was at uni! What I understood was, sometimes, letting yourself trust others to steer you into the unknown can bring incredible benefits. I am very happy I was given the opportunities to stretch my skills in this area!

3. Good things come to those sign up, reach out and build connections

You will never know the power of putting yourself out there until you do it. Since starting my career in this huge company, one of the biggest things said to me was ’take this time to build a network’. This process was an huge learning journey - mostly because I moved to the UK more than a decade ago, which at the time deprived me of anything even resembling a network. There was nothing to back me - there was only teenage me with some broken English at best, trying to make it in this strange, new world.

But once I entered GSK, I knew that this was my chance to change everything. At the start, everyone was pushing for me to start doing this thing called ’networking’ - and it was unbelievable just how embarrassed I was. I constantly felt like I was not enough, that I had nothing to provide and didn’t even know what questions to ask those whom I speak to in order to actually learn something from the interaction. Not to mention that I had no idea where to start looking for contacts.

But persevering regardless led me to so many fulfilling journeys! As a person who is excited by mentorship and knowledge transfer, I knew back then I wanted to make my mark on anyone and everyone who used to be in my situation - a scared, confused student/young person who had no idea what they were doing.

So, I began mentoring. In droves. I signed up to ZeroGravity, Stemettes, and eventually Connectr, and other internal mentoring schemes at my job. I went back to my uni at some point and got a role as one of the judges at a Women in Tech hackathon (brilliant experience by the way, I loved being on the other side and having to think like a judge than a coder!). I got involved with a lot of early careers promotion at GSK - participating in many webinars aimed at hopeful interns and grads, speaking about myself and my graduate scheme experience. One of these, the Rewriting the Code (RtC) career summit, led me to discover RtC as an organisation - which I ended up joining too, as a member, in my own time. This opened such a huge can of worms (in a positive way) in my life - I was able to join so many lovely networking meetups, and even hackathons, and meet so many lovely women who are just like me - which I would not have known about if I never gave this all a chance. It is just amazing how some things can open doors - but only if you give them time.

All of this, as well as pursuing professional contacts at work, has led me to so many valuable experiences, and learnings, that it is impossible to state them all. I’m especially grateful to my mentors - some techy, some not (mostly not techy!) - some I met by complete chance, and reached out with a ‘I think you’re amazing, can you please mentor me?’, some got assigned to me at GSK through mentoring initiatives. Hell, some of my mentors have been mentors in all but title. But all of them were incredibly useful in making me who I am today.

Good things all around!

My first year at work has been very transformative. It’s been difficult, sure, but the growth resulting from it has been super rewarding - as my grad scheme doesn’t end here (there’s another year left), you will not see me conclude just yet! There’s lots more ups and downs to be had, and I look forward to them with renewed vigor in the new (working) year!

Thank you for reading as always, and see you next time :)