It’s now been almost 3 months since I started working! On the one hand, I feel like I have found my place among my peers; I know what I can and can’t tackle, I’m loving the various projects I’m working on, and I’m actively pushing the data team forward by building a Python/PostGIS work environment for our models. My added value is in innovation and structurizing, and there’s visible progress in both.

On the other hand I am thinking about more longer-term goals, about what I want to get out of it. I like to think ahead as far as I think is reasonable, which is always at least a few months. A difference between me and my coworkers is that most of them have a more clearly defined added value; if you want to do X, get Y to tag along. Don’t know what that is for me yet. Currently I love working on lots of wildly different projects; for example, tomorrow I will start on a project to figure out potential locations for developing small-scale housing on unused plots in bad neighborhood. Yesterday I was working on figuring out how to process data on 3.5 million business. The day before I looked highly detailed and privacy-sensitive demographic data. I like the variation, but I also want to have a more clearly defined place to call my own.

Another thing I want to reconsider is how busy I want to be. Someone once said that work should be a jog in the park with well-timed sprints. The first few weeks were not much more than a walk; the second month was a full sprint, and now I’m back to a modest jog. There’s a balance between being challenged enough and having enough freedom/agency that I don’t think I’ve found yet.