This is the third in a series of four blog posts wherein Simpson Strong-Tie interns reflect on their experience at the company.
If someone asked me how my Simpson internship is going, my first impulse is just to say,“It’s a lot of fun.” I know, I know. As a third-year psych major, I should probably hit you with a 500-word thesis on cognitive behavioral dynamics in the workplace. But honestly? Interning here is just fun.
I’m Gia Minh, and my Learning & Organizational Development (L&OD) team survival guide involves sorting training logistics, figuring out what our teams need to learn and holding people’s hands through programs. You know Maslow’s pyramid? The whole point is that you can’t reach your full potential unless you have a solid foundation of security and belonging first. L&OD is basically the crew helping employees build that foundation. We schedule training and try to engineer an environment where people feel safe enough to learn and grow.
A big part of why I love it here is the people. Take Quyen — a fellow intern on the Events team – She is aggressively easygoing, effortlessly chill; she laughs at everything, never sweats the small stuff and I probably tease her way more than HR would advise. As a psych major, I find her temperament quietly fascinating. On a random day, just sitting next to her makes the air feel lighter.
Then there’s my mentor. We are opposites. She is a detailed person — meticulous and precise. On the other hand, I’m a big-picture, trust-my-gut kind of person. I move fast and have a notorious habit of skimming over the fine print.
The crazy part is that she still lets me go first. She gives me the space to figure things out and make mistakes before stepping in to show me the right way. For someone who is detail-oriented, watching me guess my way through a task must take serious patience. When she finally reviews my work, I always realize that I nailed the big picture but missed the small, logical gaps. Soon enough, without her even asking, I started slowing down. Rereading. Double-checking. Just a tiny shift, but something inside my brain quietly rearranged itself. There’s something about being trusted to fail that makes you want to get it right.
“There’s something about being trusted to mess up that makes you want to mess up less!”
In philosophy, there’s a concept called the “negation of the negation.” Simply put, growth isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You go through friction, you change, and you land somewhere that looks like the starting line, but you’re a level up. Change happens through contradiction.
I never expected to see a philosophical law play out in a corporate internship. But working with a mentor who is my total opposite created exactly the kind of friction I needed to level up. I’m still me; I still trust my intuition, but now, I’m a version of me that also pauses to check the details. The spiral went up a notch.
I came here expecting to learn the ropes of L&OD, and I did. But I also learned that the best kind of growth rarely announces itself. It just sneaks up on you, with something between a mentor’s patient feedback and a coworker’s laugh on an ordinary day.
I’m still moving fast, though. Some things don’t change.
