August 27, 2021
Frances has been an amazing mentor for my internship this summer. While I was only here for 3 months, I was able to learn so much from Frances both in terms of technical growth and career growth.
Something I really appreciate about Frances is that she pushes me in the right directions with just the right amount of support - not giving me everything I need at once, while also not giving me nothing to go off of. When I asked her questions or asked for support when I was stuck on a technical problem, Frances would point me to examples in our codebase and send useful links, but the rest was up to me to figure out, whether it was parsing through code or documentation.
Frances also encouraged me to send updates and questions in the public project channel to minimize misunderstandings and make sure everyone involved in the project knows what I'm working on. This is something I never would have thought of - I probably would have just worked on my own and only communicated with Frances or privately messaged all my questions, but this advice helped me communicate with and collaborate with the other people working on the project.
Aside from helping to develop my technical and soft skills, Frances did her best to support my success and long-term growth by providing career advice in almost every 1:1 meeting we had and by pushing me out of my comfort zone to write a blog post for the Slack Engineering blog, knowing that I am not that comfortable with writing.
Not only is Frances a great engineer and is very technically skilled, but also, she is well-respected on the Customer Acquisition team and takes initiative to suggest improvements to the team's documentation and processes, as well as bring the team together socially by organizing a team offsite and sending us stickers. I am so grateful to have had Frances as my mentor this summer!