Transformations
Jeremi discusses a challenging start to his internship; Luca recounts his experience at the Uruguayan Embassy and SelectUSA Investment Summit
Welcome back to Jeremi and Luca’s Newsletter, a weekly update brought to you by two friends on opposite ends of the country, connected by a relentless desire to learn.
The topics may seem random and disjointed (they are), but would it be fun otherwise? Either way, we promise each issue will be filled with insights, learnings, and updates, in what we hope is a good way to stay connected to friends and family.
In this sixth installment, enjoy Luca’s recount of his experience at the Uruguayan Embassy and SelectUSA, a foreign investment summit, and Jeremi’s takeaways from being challenged at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
Luca: Sowing → Reaping
Last week, I started my internship at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., met the Ambassador of France to the U.S., and attended a flight simulation conference in Las Vegas.
This week looked eerily similar—but no complaints.
While starting an internship was exclusive to last week, this week I met the Ambassador of Uruguay to the U.S. and attended SelectUSA.
Meeting the Ambassador of Uruguay to the U.S.
I’ll get to SelectUSA in just a second, but first a few quick notes on the event at the Embassy of Uruguay. Last week’s event at the Embassy of France was the first of a series of embassy visits organized by the Harvard Institute of Politics for D.C. interns.
We get the opportunity to ask tough questions, learn from the country’s ambassador, and experience some of its culture. In this case, we helped ourselves to delicious Uruguayan meat, cheese, wine, and champagne.
This is likely legally flawed, but I will add that the drinking age on Uruguayan soil is 18.
The Ambassador of Uruguay to the U.S., Andrés Augusto Durán Hareau, was a pleasure to speak with. After most people left, I was lucky enough to discuss career paths and goals with him and just one other student.
Prior to being asked by his childhood friend (President of Uruguay) to represent the country in the U.S., Ambassador Durán was a lawyer and later led a private equity firm’s M&A practice. While not the typical profile for a diplomat, it was crucial for enacting the President’s plan to bring more investment into Uruguay.
Some of you may know all of these careers interest me, including public service. For that reason alone, despite the many other topics discussed, the return on investment by going to this event was massive.
The next and final three of the embassy series consist of Costa Rica, Belgium, and Mexico. I can’t wait to learn more from such a diverse set of diplomats.
SelectUSA Investment Summit
SelectUSA is an investment summit hosted by the Department of Commerce that focuses on matching international investors with domestic businesses, states, and federal agencies to facilitate job-creating business investment into the United States.
The annual event took place this week, and I attended on Monday and Tuesday. 96 international markets and over 5,000 attendees were present.
My primary responsibility as an intern was to assist in the successful execution of the event, but it was also an outstanding opportunity to meet people and learn about a wide array of industries.
Each morning began with a 30-minute bus ride to the Gaylord Resort in Maryland and concluded with keynote addresses to the entire SelectUSA audience. The afternoons consisted of industry-specific events, as well as the main exhibition hall where every state and territory, plus applicable federal programs, were represented.
On Monday, I met the Governor of Virginia and learned a lot from talking with people like Deloitte's Michael Pangborn who consults at the nexus of public and private. I also got to hear my boss, Deputy Secretary Don Graves, announce new foreign direct investments which was an interesting way to see the DOC’s work in action.
In the afternoon, I enjoyed the aerospace industry panel. There, industry leaders from companies like Astroscale, HEO, and The Cohen Group discussed aerospace investment, technology, challenges, policy, and regulation.
Tuesday was very exciting. It began with addresses from Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (photo below).
I met the Governor of Oklahoma who announced, alongside the Deputy Secretary, a Norwegian solar energy company’s selection of Tulsa, Oklahoma for its first U.S.-based factory. This $620M investment is expected to create 320 jobs and beef up domestic production of ingots and wafers to meet the increasing demand from U.S. solar cell and panel manufacturers, supporting renewable energy sector growth.
Finally, I made a point to meet the California delegation, whose representatives generously presented me with a pin of the California flag. I learned about investment opportunities in Imperial Valley and met others who are doing real and substantial work to bring foreign business to our state.
SelectUSA excited me about this intersection of the public and private sectors to drive a greater impact. There are a lot of parallels to American Dynamism, which I wrote about in our second newsletter issue. I look forward to exploring this more in my capacity at the Department of Commerce and beyond.
The “Sowing → Reaping” Title
Usually, I’ll try my best to have the theme of each newsletter segment unspoken, but in this case, I want to make it explicit.
These stories are about more than material investment.
Sure, Ambassador Durán is focused on bringing investment into Uruguay. Yes, SelectUSA is the largest annual conference held specifically to connect foreign investors with American states and communities.
But beneath that, a little deeper, is an idea that I am investing by being here in D.C. and attending these events. Ever since I went to boarding school for just one year in 2020, the school’s motto has stuck with me.
As The Sowing, The Reaping
It’s a principle that has been ingrained into me since childhood, especially by my parents. What you put is in what you get out. Simple, but powerful. While I understand it can ignore other factors—at the risk of getting too symbolic, the quality of your soil—it demands responsibility and action, no matter the situation.
I attended the event at the Embassy of Uruguay with maybe the expectation that it could be less interesting than the Embassy of France. I was wrong, and I met someone whose career couldn’t be more interesting to me.
I volunteered at SelectUSA in my capacity as a DOC intern. I came out of the event with newfound connections, ideas, and inspirations.
In both cases, I solely focused on the process of sowing, planting seeds without the expectation of growth. And see, in this sense, I’m finding there is an important distinction within the motto: the acts of sowing and reaping are siloed off.
All I need to focus on is sowing the right seeds. The reaping follows.
Jeremi: Confusion → Clarity
I came into this internship on edge.
I learned on the first day of work that besides me and another intern, all the other interns in our group had started a week prior. I then found out quickly that I had even less experience than I initially believed in the area of cluster engineering.
It felt as though I was unfamiliar with the very language and structure that this field was built on. As the only freshman in my intern group, my initial reaction was: holy sh*t I am out of my depth.
Truthfully, it didn’t feel great. I was nervous to ask questions. I was trying to appear more knowledgeable than I actually was. My ego didn’t like it—I was embarrassed by my ignorance.
I came into the internship with the false notion that I would immediately be competent, kick ass, and then come here and tell you all how amazing of a job I was doing. It sounds childish just writing it.
In reality, I had forgotten that learning hurts. It hurts to be ignorant and confused. And to be clear—I’ve been learning plenty at school. But there is a difference between a structured form of learning where you are challenged slightly, versus being thrown into the water and forced to swim.
While it’s tougher, I also acknowledged that I had an opportunity on my hands—for heightened growth.
I had two options ahead of me. I could:
Try to hide what I didn’t know, and shy away from that feeling of ignorance. Settle for a surface-level understanding of things and try to get caught up with the other interns as quickly as possible.
Admit my ignorance. Take the time to sit in my confusion, find my questions, and ask them to those around me.
I’m not going to pretend I did a perfect, or even great, job. But I focused on slowing down, taking notes, and asking as many questions as needed to really understand the content.
And of course, I know this! I’ve written before about how much I believe learning is being able to sit in your confusion, pinpoint exactly what you don’t understand, and then begin searching for an answer. Being able to ask the right question is such an important skill.
There was just an extremity to it that I hadn’t felt in a while—the over-encompassing feeling of being in a new area where you truly don’t know anything.
But slowly, I started to understand. Things clicked into place. Definitions started to make more sense. The bigger picture started to form. What I had also forgotten, was how fun learning really is. How satisfying it is when it finally clicks. And in reality, it was not at all as grave of a situation as I thought (I have a tendency to be dramatic, as my friends like to remind me of).
When it came down to it, the stuff we were learning was really interesting. Throughout the first two weeks, I set up my own “cluster,” a miniature supercomputer of sorts.
I installed operating systems, configured networks, and set up a system for parallelizing compute tasks across my computers. I created virtual machines. With the other interns, I automated the whole setup process with a script. By Thursday morning, I was caught up with the rest of the interns.
On Thursday, we went to a fireside chat with an ML researcher here at the lab, who had worked on many projects across his years at the lab. I felt compelled to ask him: how did he approach learning and digesting information when he joined a new project in a new technical domain?
After all, if anyone had good lessons and takeaways from being thrust into completely new environments, it was him.
He had this interesting tidbit about conversations where the goal is learning:
I come in with a set of very specific, pointed questions. I want to gain understanding in a very specific area, and I make sure I understand exactly what they’re saying. Whenever they say a word/concept I don’t understand, I interrupt them, and ask them to explain that.
The last part was an interesting idea (interrupting to make sure you understand everything) that I want to explore. Usually, I settle for 70-80% comprehension when I’m asking technical questions to mentors. I took away from this: have higher standards. Reach for full 100% comprehension in conversation. Even when it would be faster and easier to just nod along to the parts that don’t fully make sense.
This will be interesting to implement for the next stage of our internship: projects.
But I’ll save the explanation of my project for next week—it’ll be more interesting to talk about when I have results to go along with. But it involves parallelizing (really the theme of my internship so far) queries into large databases, on the order of tens of billions of entries.
Some other fun experiences from the week were befriending someone with a shared interest in ethics and ping pong (the ultimate combination of interests), creating an intern basketball group, and finally getting back to training on the bike.
Overall, the week had a lot of reflection, so it was nice to be able to get back on my bike—where I often do my best thinking.
Very impressive. Jeremi , you’ve always liked a challenge 😊