Focus Pia’s Experience As An Intern At Shearwater

The original plan has always been to be an engineer. Although I must admit that I had a brief dream of being a cashier at my local gas station (until I found out they didn’t get to eat the candy). From about age 12 I knew I wanted to work with numbers. That dream followed me to secondary school where I took high levels of mathematics and physics. However, along that path I noticed a brewing passion for understanding the mechanisms of social processes. This led me to apply for a psychology bachelor’s at the University of Bergen. 

Even though some less interesting lectures on the history of psychology gave me second thoughts, I was quickly back on track upon discovering there was an opportunity to specialize in work and organizational psychology. More than 4 years later I am now starting my final year of my master’s in psychology, specializing in just that: the psychology behind people working together. I soon found myself in the minority of people in my study who favored the statistical subjects, and since then I have been engaged in using psychometrics and people analytics to create better work environments

An opening in a company that was working with seismic acquisition but were searching for someone in HR. Could it be? Not long after, I got an e-mail with an invitation to an interview. The invitation read “attendees from Shearwater will be HR manager Europe and Global Head of HR”, and I remember thinking “how on earth do these two important positions have the time out of their day to interview someone for such an entry level position?”. 

The nerves were at an all-time high when I was logging on to meet with the somewhat intimidating people that I had created an image of in my head. But from the second the interview started I got a well-deserved mixture of an epiphany and a reality check. This was exactly the type of company that Shearwater was. A company where people weren’t meant to be intimidating or “too high up” in the hierarchy to meet with a potential intern. Mari and Kerry made me realize that I could be just as much of a value to them that they were to me, and I fully accepted that Shearwater was a company where I was simply meant to be.

So now, a few months later, I have a one-year internship in Shearwater, already working on amazing projects and tasks that I simply did not have the imagination to dream of 4 years ago when I decided to follow the dream of working with people in addition to the numbers.