At my last coop, I worked at a large financial institution in New York called Goldman Sachs. It might seem like an odd choice as a computer science major, but they are becoming reliant on technology to keep the company up and running and as a result, almost a third of the company now has some sort of technology background. However, being a finance company, I had to regularly interact with people coming from finance backgrounds, and all of my projects ended up being related to finance. When first getting started there, it was interesting to see how my coworkers in technology would interact with their finance oriented peers versus the technology oriented peers. With their technology peers, they seemed to talk more openly about projects, and use plenty of jargon that was relevant to the technology industry. When talking to their peers in finance, they would choose words carefully so someone without a technology background could understand the idea they were trying to convey. It was the same the other way around too: I noticed that my finance peers would use a lot of analogies to when trying to explain financial topics to us. When communicating, both sides had to cut down on the disciplinary jargon in order to convey their ideas to each other.
After talking some of my coworkers, what surprised me was the diversity in college background of various people working in finance. Sure there were a decent amount of people who majored in finance, but there was also a significant amount of employees who majored in disciplines such as psychology, history, engineering and english. A question I would commonly ask is how they applied what they learned in college to their current position, and I got a variety of interesting answers. For example, a psychology major explained to me that his discipline gave him the ability to better understand how the human brain works, and he could use that to be better at managing his team. The English major told me that his discipline helped him convey his thoughts and ideas clearly, which helped in emails, meetings and when giving presentations. Overall, this coop had more transdisciplinary interaction than most computer science coops, and let me improve my ability to communicate with coworkers who come from various backgrounds and disciplines.
