Hey, everyone. Thanks for reading! Last winter, I was fortunate enough to be offered a summer software engineering internship with Google in Los Angeles. I have created this blog to talk about my experiences with my internship, California, and traveling. I'll start off the blog with talking about how I got my internship!
Working for Google had always been a dream for me. I have always been interested in computers, tinkering with them when I was young and creating websites in middle school. I got to work for my high school during the summers to maintain their websites and worked with great leadership (and life role models) in the technical department. Then, I worked for the Village of Gurnee with another wonderful person the two summers after my senior year of high school. At both of these places, I was given a lot of autonomy, which helped me learn a lot and build some really cool things (thank you guys!).
I applied for a Google software engineering internship last summer but did not get selected for an interview. On the upside, I was lucky enough to work as a Programmer Analyst at Boeing. Once again, it was a great experience, I met a lot of awesome people (including the best mentor), and I learned a ton! A Google recruiter contacted me late in the summer inviting me to apply, and I applied as soon as the job was posted. Surprisingly, I was offered a couple of technical interviews soon after!
With a month between being offered the interviews and when they were scheduled, I prepared a lot for them. Gayle McDowell has written an amazing book called Cracking the Coding Interview, which I read religiously and which helped tremendously. On the day of my interviews, I felt like I was prepared as I could be and went through with them. I'd like to say I was super confident and calm, but that's definitely not true ;) Nonetheless, they went pretty well, and I found out the next day that I passed them and moved onto the next stage: finding a team to work with.
It took awhile to find a team to work on, but eventually I spoke with three different managers about their projects: one in New York, one in Boulder, and one in LA. I said I wanted to work with the team in LA, and for some reason, they wanted to work with me too!
I got my final offer in December, a whole semester of school away from my internship. Needless to say, I was very excited about it, and I couldn't wait for school to finish so I could start! I did have some preparation to do such as finding a place to stay. For many reasons (including financial and experiential), I decided to go with Airbnb, which if you didn't know is a place where someone can put up a room in their house for rent and someone like me can pay to stay for some amount of time -- usually only a short time for a vacation but possibly longer for people like me. My office is actually in Venice, CA (west of LA on the coast), and I decided to live in Santa Monica, CA (immediately north of Venice). The place I'm staying at is close enough to work that I can bike, and I'm very excited about that.
Another big deal of preparation dealt with my traveling to California. I could have just flown, of course, but I decided to go on a road trip instead! I'll talk more about that in my next blog post (I'm writing this after I completed my road trip, so it shouldn't be long). Fortunately for you, I decided to get a DSLR camera to better capture my summer, so I will have pictures to share!