I often tell people that my day job is about the best job in the world. Every semester I get to meet some outstanding young people who are just starting to make their mark on the world. I love class when someone challenges me and asks hard questions. My role here also gives me the same opportunity – we hire late juniors and seniors in high school and try to keep them as long as we can. What I am looking for is a little bit of arrogance (confidence), a little tiny bit of humility and a lot of curiosity and persistence – no experience necessary or really even wanted. Most importantly, I am looking for integrity. They work remotely and I don’t want to invest in monitoring systems and I need them to quickly report when they make an error.

Our training is pretty ad-hoc and is initially focused on helping them learn the importance of details. We have tools that we use to identify, extract and normalize executive and director compensation. If we knew everything about the way the data is going to be presented in the filings we wouldn’t have to use humans because we can address the issues in code. But there are a lot of nuances that get added each year. Some days it feels like we are playing whack-a-mole with choices registrants make, We used to believe that II was part of the name in a Name/Title cell – but today one company used that in the title. I have gone too much in the weeds. The point is we need our interns to be really curious and questioning when they are looking at details.

They start off doing tasks that keep our processes running and learning how to question everything they see in one of our dashboards (does that II really belong in the title). At some point we start teaching them Python. When we start teaching them to code – the focus is on learning how to break tasks into the smallest possible step. It takes roughly a year before they are proficient enough to start making independent contributions to our code base. I will give them some goal and when they ask questions I try mostly to make sure they are asking the right question and then rather than giving them the answer I send them into our Experiments channel on Slack or to Stack Overflow.

One of our interns, Michael Pineda, had a really interesting weekend. Michael is a Mechanical Engineering sophomore at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL). He started with us late in the fall of his senior year in high school. He is a member of the UNL Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) club. Each year SAE clubs at colleges across the country compete in the Formula SAE. They build a small formula style race car from scratch. The competition includes the presentation of a business case for their car. This weekend they had to get the car in front of alumni for the first public viewing. Michael is a lead on the suspension team. He shared these pictures in Slack with the rest of our team at 5:45 AM Sunday. Here are some pictures of their car:

Here is the car:

Do you think Michael is curious and questioning? He has been at work on a new project that is going to be disclosed about the time we release version 5 (I hope). Michael has been offered a fantastic mechanical engineering internship over the summer. Like all of our interns – he will be leaving us to bigger and better things – but it sure is fun to work with them at this point in their lives.

Between them two of our interns are competing at the national level in seven academic competitions in the next month (Mock Trial, Speech & Debate, Academic Decathlon . . .) Three of our interns are enrolled in 12 total AP courses this semester. The two that are graduating from high school this year have been offered academic scholarships in excess of $250,000 (+/-~). Our newest intern is keeping up with a challenging academic schedule and doing some amazing things in the long-jump and relays for her high school.

I know I am rambling, but I would remiss if I did not mention Shelby Lesseig. Shelby was an intern while she was working on her BBA (Accounting)/MPA at UT Austin. I just checked out her Linked-In profile:

Shelby came on while I was still learning about the characteristics we really needed in interns and she unwittingly helped me better identify some of those qualities – she set an early standard that we still use today. We still use some of Shelby’s early work to manage our data extraction and normalization processes. Shelby’s husband and his colleagues have actually benefited from some of her work. Is that cool or what!

This post was prompted by Michael’s excitement over his contribution to the race car and me coming to terms with the fact that he is going to be moving on soon. It made me think more about this journey and while it has been challenging at times – I really do think the best part of it continues to be getting to work with such bright interns (I was going to say kids but I don’t want to diminish them at all).