On my previous internship, there’s a unique event that employees could participated in called “Lunch Ninja”. Basically, you’ll get match to a random employee whose also participating in the event to do lunch together and talk about a certain topic. The topics could range from just casual conversation, career development, to race and identity.

One of my lunch ninjas was with a Strategy & Insight Manager at Google and when I asked her what her advice for me as someone who’s just starting out in my career, she told me: “make sure you ask for a good feedback”. People usually prefer to be seen as a nice person, and that could mean holding back when they’re asked for a feedback. Although simple phrases like

“Oh you did good, you helped the team!”

“You done a significant portion of the team’s task!”

are flattering, it doesn’t show the full story, or at least the one that really matters. It doesn’t show what we’re still lacking of and what we need to improve to be better at our jobs. Especially since we’re still starting out, we know for sure we messed up in some areas of our work, and we need to know that so that we can make an action to improve ourselves in the future.

The thing is, it’s our responsibility to ask for it. We need to make sure, even if we need to press our supervisor a little bit, that we get pointers of what could be improve on our work. We can’t blame others for not telling us what we want, because we need to be direct in our communication so that we can get what we want, and in this case, it’s getting good feedback that we could use to make actions to improve ourselves.

Turns out, you can get a lot from a talk over lunch, even with a random person. Especially, talking to people from a different background is a really interesting experience because you’ll get to know different perspectives and opinions on things. Wonder how I could replicate this kind of thing when I’m back at school. That’s all.