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My Summer @ Google - Engineering Practicum
September 16, 2011
Introduction: What better way to tell you about Google’s summer programs and internships than to hear it from the students themselves? We continue this series with a post from Mark, a junior at Carnegie Mellon University who was a part of this summer’s
Engineering Practicum
internship program (formerly known as BOLD Practicum). You can
apply here
to be considered for this year’s Engineering Practicum internship program. Applications are due by October 15th.
The Engineering Practicum internship program is a unique 10-week program created to encourage the development and diversity of future computer scientists. This summer Engineering Practicum brought 62 rising juniors to four different offices around the country. I first heard about it through a program that I attended last summer, called
Google FUSE
. During FUSE, 50 rising sophomores were invited to the Seattle and New York offices to get to know Google. We toured the office, learned about some Google products, had a beach barbecue and had a great time.
When I applied for Engineering Practicum during the following fall, I already had a high bar set. Could this experience maintain the sense of fun and energy that we had in Seattle? You bet it could. Over the summer, we experienced the smorgasbord that is Google. We participated in the crazy and exciting product launches, such as
Google+
. We attended talks by head figures of the company and even danced 80's style with Senior Vice President Alan Eustace on a boat cruise in San Francisco. And through our projects and time there, we made a lasting impact on the company and a lasting network with each other.
At its core, the Engineering Practicum is a technical internship. It's ten weeks among Google engineers: walking in their shoes, eating their cake, riding their bike, and wearing their hats. When we arrived, we were split up into 2-3 person pods, and then given a host who would direct and oversee our project. The projects were diverse—in Mountain View alone we had teams in many major areas such as search, ads, and maps. I and two fellow interns worked on the Gmail performance team. After settling in and learning about Google's infrastructure, our hosts gave us our project, which was to develop new tools to analyze patterns and anomalies in computer performance data. We spent our summer researching methods and developing these tools. Though we tested these tools on Gmail data, potentially they could be used by many other teams. In our final week, we wrapped up the project by giving a short presentation.
The Engineering Practicum program was about more than the project. Every week we would attend talks on topics ranging from how Google services operate at a global level, to exciting new technologies such as HTML5. Also, although not required, we were free to attend any of the talks open to Google employees, and some of my favorite moments were spent listening to talks from huge figures in the industry, such as
Chee Chew
on leadership,
Peter Norvig
on AI, and of course
Larry
and
Sergey
at the weekly all-hands meeting. And when I wasn't solving challenging problems or listening to great talks, I was out having fun with fellow Engineering Practicum students.
All of this added up to an amazing experience. By the end, not only had I learned a great set of technical practices, I was left with a collection of unforgettable moments with a group of unforgettable people. Going into my third year of college, I now have a concrete experience in computer science, which makes what I’m learning in the classroom all the more tangible.
Posted by Mark Perez, 2011 Engineering Practicum participant
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