I am Julie Walker. I’m a navigation engineer at Intuitive surgical. I have a PhD in mechanical engineering.

I really love the combination of human robotic interfaces and so especially coming from my background in haptics where the person is physically touching, it’s a lot more interesting to me to work on a robotic system that has to interact with a human user.

There definitely are days where nothing is working and I feel really grumpy. I think trying to treat my job as a learning experience is a healthy attitude for me to understand that every time I’m struggling with something, it’s because I’m learning something new. And that is why I wanted to take this job in the first place. It was because I knew that it would give me the opportunity to learn a lot of new skills. I think in particular for me, coming from mechanical engineering where I did a lot of software, but I wasn’t writing software, for a commercial product, I wasn’t writing software that other people had to use. It was just for me and so if it wasn’t very good, that’s fine. And now I’m in a production code base with a much higher standard than what I had written before. And so I am spending a lot of time trying to get better at writing code that is easy to read, that is more stable, that is going to be more useful in many applications. And so every time I feel like I haven’t done a good job on some, some implementing something in code, I know that I’m getting better and that it’s, and I get feedback from all my teammates and I can improve. It sometimes doesn’t feel good to have a lot of feedback but you don’t get better by doing things correctly. You get better by doing things wrong. It makes me feel better to think about it that way.

[To see more of Julie’s views, explore our Career Conversations feature “Role of medical robots in healthcare.”]

Thank you, Julie, for sharing your experience and thoughts.

Having moody and slow days are situations that we all experience, especially if it’s something we have to do, but are quite new to it. The worry of failing or not being good enough comes to mind, but once we actually start the task, it feels much more motivating than having thought of. Realizing that learning something new motivates to be persistent and see the outcomes is one of the best situations.

I had a similar experience when I started learning coding. At first I was a bit skeptical about it, and wondered if I will be able to succeed. But the more time I gave it, got feedback from my friends and tried different exercises, the better I got in that skill. All it took for me was just realizing that if I stick through the struggle, which is the hard part, I would end up with a useful and necessary skill. Now I try to develop this behavior to other areas that I’m interested in, knowing that it is worth going through the struggle if I’m learning something new.