Any student who has worked on a group project (especially a programming project) or anyone who has worked within a large organization understands how important effective communication is. This is something I learned very quickly during my data science internship. I’d like to share three simple ways I learned to practice and promote effective communication during my remote data science internship.

1. Ask questions during meetings

I tend to be afraid to ask questions because I think that everyone else already knows what’s going on and I’m wasting everyone’s time by asking the question. I can say from experience now that this isn’t true. If you genuinely have a question, then there’s a high probability that other people have that same question. By asking it and getting an answer, you’re helping your team by making sure everyone is on the same page (and you’re also showing your team that you’re paying attention and don’t just have the zoom window minimized). Moreover, you’re challenging everyone to check their assumptions and ensure they really understand the details of what they’re talking about. At the end of my internship, one of my co-workers nicely told me that she appreciated all of the questions I had asked during my internship, for all the reasons I gave above.

2. Answer questions during meetings

This can be intimidating as an intern, since you might (like me) think that your non-intern teammates are more qualified to answer than you. It might be that they are more qualified, but if you genuinely think you have some answer to the question (even a partial answer), then you deserve to be heard and your answer has value. As an example, I was in a meeting where the data science team was discussing how to use some user collected data to improve the company’s machine learning models. Even though the team was composed of extremely smart people (4 PhDs and 1 Math+CompSci double major), no one floated an idea that everyone was excited about. I decided to pitch in my two cents, and to my surprise, they liked it. In fact, my idea turned into a project that was allowed to work on and eventually deploy for customer use in production. Had I not decided to participate in that original discussion, that would have never happened.

3. Use visuals to articulate your ideas

This one sounds obvious, but there were many occasions where whiteboarding an idea or creating a flowchart helped everyone on the data science team get on the same page about a problem we were trying to solve. Drawing your idea helps you think about it in a more abstract way and can serve as a guide for how to implement it or refine it. Drawing can be tough if you’re working remotely and don’t have access to a tablet you can use for digital art, but even mouse-drawings can be helpful and flowcharts typically don’t require you to freehand draw.

Conclusion

I like these three ideas of communication because they’re simple and effective. I hope you find them useful, and I intend to continue to do this as a student and in my future work.