#20 - Ode to our Interns
Reflections on time, growth and human potential becoming kinetic reality.
I’ve always loved Paul Newman
in the Color of Money when he taught the hustler's sacrament
that money won is twice as sweet as money earned.
He may have erred in his assessment.
If there were ever such a thing,
That were double the sweetness, loved and yearned
It would be the gift of wisdom learned.
But twinned again would be to share it with those under wing.
Ben Wang, 2024Jay Danao believed it was our responsibility at Chimera to bring on interns, “to help train the next generation of scientists.” And he was both committed to this as well as extremely good at it. He would welcome people, structure projects, provide feedback and push them to excel. Our interns loved him in return - a true partnership in the growth of coach and intern. Jay kept getting better at this, after all.
At Lessons in Chimeristry, we believe that one of the key hallmarks of strong corporate cultures is personal and professional growth and development.1 At Chimera we didn’t believe that this should be limited by “corporate hierarchy” or “organizational charts.” Rather we trusted the existence of an exigent, common, human intention to be the best versions of ourselves, individually and collectively.
Focus on the slope (tomorrow), not the y-intercept (today)
We encourage growth in all whom we encounter. We expand on Carol Dweck’s theory of growth mindset to accommodate others’ growth as well. We attempt to effect this in several ways:
Hump gatherings, where all are simultaneously teachers and students
Joint journal clubs, held with friends at Coda, JLABS and Nkarta
Our interview process, which was oriented to help potential candidates shine, as opposed to being examined to the find the limits of their skills and experiences today. We would look for, as certain sports scouts say, upside potential.
An official connection to Chimera is unnecessary; you don’t have to be an employee, or a collaborator, or partner, or a sister company to Chimera for us to hope that you grow to be the best version of yourself, individually and as a group. We imagined others aspiring to all that they didn’t know they could possibly become, like an unending, staggering human crescendo. Internships are a natural adjacency to this; to see potential in a human being and play a small role in helping them realize it. And thus our investment in our interns. Our first hire indeed, back in 2015, was our first employee, our first intern, Anna Mueller.
Go to the Limits of your Longing
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand
- RMRInterns as investments in the future and the now
Large organizations typically use internships to increase the pipeline for future talent - it’s a great way to mutually acquaint a prospective employee with an organization. When done excellently, this can accomplish two things:
Build relationships with excellent talent for future hires, while gaining a mutual understanding of fit, or what it might be like to work together.
Inject a dose of innovation, inspiration and insouciance into organizations that become used to the status quo.
The second point is especially poignant and important, but requires an atmosphere where interns can freely think and speak their minds. I will not forget a conversation I overheard when Anna, who didn’t need anyone’s permission, told a well known life science investor: “You people are the problem. You don’t fund good research, you just fund whatever your friends are funding, so you can be in a club.”2 This is the spark and spunk you can get from great interns!
Challenges for internships in startups
Anecdotally, smaller organizations, like startups, often take very few interns. It can be seen as time consuming and distracting. The internship requires additional training, educating, mentoring and scoping of a project. It takes effort and energy from a mentor. Sometimes near term priorities shift, as a company seeks product market fit, or is in early product development, making it difficult to plan for and implement a good internship.
And being limited in time to typically around a quarter or two, the scope of an intern’s project winds up being narrow. Internships can be devoid of the feeling of ownership and agency that are needed to inflame the passion for work. While our number of interns we’ve had is relatively small, we think we’ve come up with some practices that have generally enabled proportionally scoped out work, transition towards full time employment and maintain fond connections after the internship is over.
(semi) Structure of Chimera internship
There are of course formal and useful processes to leverage when considering to bring on interns, including frameworks to properly onboard them. Our suggestions here don’t replace this sage advice3 but add a few considerations that are specific to Chimera. I believe they are universal, but being a small organization, I concede that some of these guidelines are easier to implement, than in a much larger organization.
Interview: We are upfront about our reasons for bringing on interns and why we use the diamond framework for interviewing all Chimerans. This allows them to observe how we live up to our own values, even during the interview process.
Onboarding: This is where the Chimera magic happens. The intern, over the course of the first week, connects with many different Chimerans, sometimes for lunch, other times for a chat. Conversations will range from scientific to personal or even aspirational. Nurturing these early relationships, attempts to build trust and safety for interns to be open with their communication.
Payment: We believe in paying interns for their work. In certain cases it is illegal to not pay interns for the work they do (like in California), but we believe that philosophically, it is important to provide wages, in exchange for their work.
Scoping the work: this is where Jay and many other Chimerans shine. Jay is excellent at portioning out work, such that a 10, 12, or 26 week project can result in a tangible deliverable, that the intern can take away as their own: a set of data, a poster, or a presentation. Jay likely developed this skill while training to become a chef, which included his own internship at Cesar. Interns often:
Learn basic laboratory safety, techniques on instrumentation, reagent preparation and experimental procedures
Review literature and develop an understanding of Chimera technology and science relevant to their project
Encouraged to develop skills that they are motivated to learn, including computational biology or business development
Participate in R&D meetings and All-Diamonds meetings so they have a better understanding of how their work fits into our bigger picture
Hump gatherings: all interns must give their own hump meetings, after observing a few others. All of the intern hump gathering were intriguing, personal and well received. In the history of interns, only Joe Solvason chose to do a legitimate scientific deep dive that bordered on becoming a journal club. He only did one of those; he learned his lesson as to what hump gatherings were.
Farewell: Chimera is known for a low threshold for celebration. When it’s time for the intern to bid farewell, we celebrate their time and mourn their loss!
Differences between mentorship and coaching
Semantics aside, there are overlapping differences between coaching and mentoring. Think of the typical coach; they help you learn a new skill (how to do cloning) or push you to excel (setting bold performance goals). A mentor is different; they help plot your career arc (choosing new opportunities) and challenge thinking (asking questions to help frame a problem, even if they know the answer). Of course we can draw up a foursquare here with some other attributes:
On the whole, coaches tend to be tactical while mentors tend towards strategy. And if you are lucky, you can get both, with a medium sized drink and fries with it, as we highlight with some fictional sports coaches and mentors:
Different Internship Programs
One company that I particularly admire in their approach to mentorship is Sri Kosuri’s Octant Bio, a synthetic biology company focused on novel drug development. They have a formal program, called an Apprenticeship, where they help early-career scientists and engineers, grow both technical and professional skills, through a defined year-long internship program. They’ve recently kicked off a high school mentoring program as well. Their overall passion for science and engineering, employees who have strong mentorship heft (like my friend, former Octantian Curt Fischer) and incredible laboratory assets has enabled them to create an ecosystem that will foster interest, excitement and hands-on experience amongst students, nascent in their STEM career. It’s clear they are committed to growing the pie.
And we don’t have to wait for employers to create internship programs, as sometimes they are created by students themselves. I was fortunate to play a small role in a club at a local school called Burlingame Cancer Research, where literal children built their own mentorship network. In the early days of Chimera, Lesley Stolz, one of our advocates at JLABS, asked me to mentor these mission driven and passionate high school kids, including her daughter Hannah. The group had formed as an after school project based on shared interest in cancer research and after personal brushes with the disease. They reached out to UCSF professors like Pam Munster and Genentech’s Shannon Hurley, where they learned about drug development and clinical trials. I sat with them, biweekly, at the Burlingame library to discuss immuno-oncology and helped guide their interests in new therapeutics like CAR-T, bispecific engagers, genetically targeted therapies and oncolytic viruses. They read and translated papers and gave presentations to one another, eventually presenting at JLABS to an audience of scientists and startup founders.
There are so many useful models to craft internships. StartX, the Stanford affiliated startup accelerator runs a program called Students-in-Residence, where students armed with a start up concept gain access to resources, mentorship and the StartX community to begin working on their company, while they complete school. My friend Liz, has built an industry internship program for East College Preparatory , a local high school with the mission of “opening new doors for students historically underrepresented in higher education.” The students, including those who have graduated from ECPS, are paired with professionals in Silicon Valley to obtain, often first, experiences in a professional workplace. San Francisco State’s Biotechnology program works to place their students at startups in the JLABS incubators in South San Francisco, where Chimera was located.
There’s no shortage of ways to get involved or to build a stand alone program.
Interns grace us with their being
Inevitably interns grow (up?). Unbelievably the interns Kevin and I had 15 years ago at Svaya were still in high school, college and in some cases, graduate school students. Over the course of the ensuing decade and a half, many received new degrees, started jobs and got married.
When I pause and reflect on several of them, I am astounded. Hannah Murnen became a powerhouse CTO & leader at multiple materials and climate tech companies. Melanie Sutherland founded her own consumer company before heading off to Google. Jared O’Leary just kicked off his new company, SirenOpt, as CEO, fresh out of his PhD. I feel an incredible sense of pride to have known them, having shared a temporary home with these inspiring humans and, maybe, helped them learn what they wanted to do… or not.
I cannot wait to see what the folks below have in store for them in the coming years, our very own Chimerinterns:
Anna Mueller - recently defended her PhD from U Vienna
Joseph Solvason - recently defended his PhD from UCSD
Kierra Franklin - currently completing her PhD at Emory
Charlotte Davis - blossoming into a landscape architect
Nicole Grant - Research Associate at Arcus Therapeutics
Antoine Madrona - completed masters at Lausanne, Currently a Data Engineer
David Mai - Recently defended his PhD at UPenn in lab of Carl June
Evelyn Alvarez - Director of 3D Organic Silk
Alexia Rydfors - headed to law school
With Giles’ assistance we are trying to develop a quantitative metric for career growth.
This may not be a direct quote, but it’s awfully close.
And legal guidance as employment, including internships, can be governed by both State and Federal law