Google Student Blog: Diary of an Intern

Student Blog

Brought to you from your @GoogleStudents friends. From pre-university to PhD (and beyond), we got you.

Please welcome Atima Lui as she blogs about her first week as a BOLD Intern for our Diary of an Intern series!!

Hi everyone!

As soon as I received my company laptop compliments of the BOLD intern program, I immediately logged on to Google Talk and updated my status to “Back at Google!” I had just arrived to the Googleplex in Mountain View to begin on-boarding with 79 other interns for the non-engineering side of Google’s business. Some of the interns were returning to the program as I was, and others were beginning their Googley journey as a summer intern for the first time. Much like the feeling I get when I return from college to my home in Topeka, Kansas, being back at Google felt like coming back to a place where I belonged.

One of the people I was most excited about seeing on my first day was Jenny or “Mama BOLD” as we interns sometimes affectionately call her. Jenny plays a huge role in making BOLD happen each year. She coordinates everything from organizing our orientation and planning special tours and events, to working with Google offices in foreign countries in order to continue to grow the BOLD program and make it international. As soon as the other returning interns and I saw Jenny, we immediately ran toward her and gave her a big huge group hug! (Hugging is strongly encouraged in the BOLD Program. After all, we are like a family.)

I was also very excited to meet the approximately 70 new interns. The program is even bigger than it was last year, so the prospect of getting to know so many new smart and driven people over the course of the summer is a real treat.

My first three days here at Google have been all about orienting myself and acclimating back into Google work and culture. As I previously mentioned, we were all given company laptops on the first day. We also received backpacks, pens, t-shirts, and other items with the Google logo on them to get us pumped about being here and also to use during our internships.

During these first few days, we ran though a series of training sessions to make sure we were equipped with the knowledge we needed as Nooglers (or New Googlers). The trainings were very informative and taught us about important things such as how to work with our managers, set goals for the summer, and succeed in our summer projects.

The real fun began yesterday when all of the BOLD interns engaged in an iron chef competition! This bonding activity involved each of us designing the recipes for personal-sized pizzas. We then got to put the ingredients onto our pizzas and, with the help of some of the amazing chefs at Google, put our pizzas into the big pizza ovens. The chefs then judged our pizzas and picked the top winners. While I did not win the competition, I certainly had a lot of fun! I collaborated with two intern teammates Jay and Akhila to create three personal pizzas that spelled out the words “Google BOLD.” It was certainly awesome.

At the end of the third day, on-boarding was officially over and the BOLD Program unleashed us interns onto Google so that most of the students could meet their managers for the first time. I can’t wait to introduce you all to my manager, my team, and my co-intern who will be working with me. I have big plans to feature them in future blog posts. :)

My team at YouTube is made up of Creative Project Managers who work on really cool advertising campaigns on YouTube. One cool project they worked on last year, for example, was a live Alicia Keys concert on YouTube.com!

That’s all for now. Look out for more from me in two weeks!

Cheers,
Atima