Day 1 – 3/19

Today Brooke Steven­son ‘01, the CEO of Spry, talked to us briefly about what the com­pany is and how it oper­ates.  She was very kind and wel­com­ing, which was indica­tive of the gen­eral office envi­ron­ment we would later encounter.  After­wards, Christina (who stayed with us the entire time) began teach­ing us basics on how the com­pany oper­ates and the query­ing lan­guage that it uses.  Tris­tan, a recent Prince­ton grad­u­ate, later joined her.  He had a lot of good insight on the dif­fer­ences between our col­lege and post-graduate expe­ri­ence, notably the changes in expec­ta­tions for work and the type of knowl­edge that is actu­ally applied to the real world. We spent most of the day learn­ing about the data­base, Knoodl, that they had con­structed to inter­pret the lan­guage of seman­tics that is Spry’s trade­mark.
 
Day 2 – 3/20

Now that we were briefed on the basics, today was more in depth.  Hav­ing a stronger back­ground on what the com­pany itself does, we began to dive into more tech­ni­cal details of the lan­guages and meth­ods they use.  The atmos­phere of the office became more appar­ent, and I began to appre­ci­ate the casual work­place demeanor.  We got to talk to a lot of the employ­ees about how they oper­ate on a day-to-day basis, which was very help­ful.  In par­tic­u­lar, a lot of the advice we got was related to our future and the key dif­fer­ences between the col­lege and work­place expe­ri­ence.  Towards the end of the day, we talked to two very recent Prince­ton grad­u­ates from Reve­lytix (a com­pany that fre­quently col­lab­o­rates with Spry) and their take on post-college life.
 
Day 3 – 3/21

Christo­pher, Brooke Steven­son, and fel­low Princeterns

We finally got to dive in and really explore the tools that employ­ees of Spry use reg­u­larly, espe­cially in the ana­lyt­ics depart­ment.  Christina con­tin­ued to guide us as we did more work in Knoodl as well as Sparql, a rela­tional data­base query lan­guage that Spry often uses.  We even got to apply some of these queries to a project that Spry was work­ing on, to see how they are imple­mented.  Toward the end of the day, Andy, the direc­tor of ana­lyt­ics, came in and talked to us about the advan­tages of work­ing at a small start-up like Spry as opposed to the gov­ern­ment.  His knowl­edge and advice was very cred­i­ble and valu­able, and his mil­i­tary back­ground allowed him to give us a good per­spec­tive on the value of places like Spry.  Brooke bid us farewell and we went on our way, con­tent with what we had learned about the com­pany and the start-up envi­ron­ment in general.