This is my first internship ever, and my first internship ever just so happens to be a 9-6pm software engineering job where my most useful tool is the computer. What this means is that I sit…a lot. I have never ever experienced so much sitting per day in my life (except for maybe sitting on a bike seat for ten hours a day, if that counts), and I’ll be honest with you: it’s difficult.
Frankly, it is impossible for me to sit for longer than an hour straight, and so at least six or seven times a day, I’ll get up to take a restroom break or grab a snack or a glass of water from the kitchen. The mornings prior to lunch are usually fine; I am able to get through about three hours of work with only a few five-minute breaks here and there. After lunch, it is a different story. While it may be due to a partial food coma, I am almost certain that the tiredness I experience after 1pm is due to a lack of physical activity. For the next five hours, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay focused, eyes fixated on a screen with code, and I take more frequent breaks as the day rolls on. By the time I leave work around 5:45pm, my brain, my eyes, and my body are tired from thinking, staring, and sitting.
At lunch yesterday, I asked one of my coworkers if sitting for so many hours a day bothers her. “Not really - I’m used to it!” It makes sense that as a computer scientist or software engineer that much of the day is spent sitting in front of a screen, programming. Perhaps it is because I am not familiar to this 9-6pm schedule that the days seems incredibly long and hard to get through, especially near the end.
Despite the physical inactivity, I am really learning a lot at this internship. My brain is full of new words and algorithms and concepts that I did not know of twelve days ago, and I am very grateful to be where I am, doing what I am doing.
Desk jobs, as unfavorable as they seem, are quite prevalent in the workplace. It makes me think about the Zumba class I teach back at MIT from 12-1pm every Tuesday. It’s a free class, open to any MIT affiliate, and I usually get around 20-30 MIT students and faculty every week to dance to Latin-inspired routines with me for sixty minutes. Sometimes, I get participants that come up to me after class and say how much they enjoyed the class or how they have been looking forward to it all day or that it is the highlight of their day. This is the first time I have though that maybe - maybe some of my participants have desk jobs, and they sit from 9-6pm every day, and the one hour of Zumba is the only time they’ll get up and move around that day...
Movement and interaction with other people really makes a difference on a day-to-day basis, and I know that whatever I end up doing in life, it will have to involve those two components.
Anyways, there's a dog at the startup. Her name is Shelly, and here's a picture of her lying by my desk today.
