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Diary of a Summer Intern - Erika
July 15, 2011
皆さん、こんにちは!
Even though I am currently living abroad, I was able to celebrate the 4th of July (U.S. Independence Day) with the red and white stripes of
T.G.I. Friday’s
, Tokyo. Celebrating the holiday across the Pacific made me nostalgic for fireworks, but singing the
“Star Spangled Banner”
while enjoying American-influenced appetizers partially made up for this. The Tokyo office carried on with business as usual, but with the U.S. offices closed, my email inbox was considerably lighter. This gave me a little more free time to make sure my project is on schedule and wrap up some unfinished tasks.
The second half of my internship has continued to keep me busy and two weeks ago, the Tokyo office hosted a maps personalization team summit in Japan. Engineers and product managers on the maps teams from the
Zurich
,
London
,
Seattle
and
Mountain View
offices met face-to-face with the Tokyo team to discuss our project goals. For the next four days, we worked side-by-side in a large conference room. It was great being able to get immediate feedback from the rest of the team without having to rely on email or take time zone differences into account. The first day and a half was centered around brainstorming, discussing and prioritizing project ideas. After that, we spent a few days building demos and on the final day we presented our projects. It was incredible to see how much work we were able to accomplish in just four days.
An important part of Japanese business culture is to take guests out to dinner after work. We took our guests for traditional Japanese cuisine:
okonomiyaki
,
yakiniku
and fresh sashimi sushi at the world famous
Tsukiji fish market
. Many consider this an extension of the business day, but I had such a great time hosting, I could hardly count it as business—although, Google has definitely taught me that work and fun don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Erika at the top of the Mori Tower Sky Deck
On another note, a few more interns have joined the Google team in Japan (hooray for not being the only one on the Tokyo interns listserve!). Calvin Lee, a rising senior in computer science at Princeton University, joined as a fellow associate product manager intern in June and just completed his first month of the internship program. He is a member of the YouTube team and although our desks are on opposite side of the office, we still meet up for frequent snack breaks and hangouts in the game room. We also welcomed three new software engineers to the team just last week. Our intern force is slowly growing and we’re set to get another influx when the Japanese interns join us in August.
Until next time,
エリカ (Erika)
Fun Google Fact: Googlers get free access to the
Mori Tower Sky Deck
, which is an open-air observatory located on the roof with a phenomenal 360 degree view of Tokyo. If you’re ever in Tokyo, I would highly recommend it! (see picture above)
Posted by Jessica Safir, University Programs Coordinator
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