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My Summer @ Google: Freshmen Engineering Practicum
September 10, 2012
Introduction: Over the summer we host a variety of programs and internships for
technical
and
non-technical
students. We’re relaunching the
My Summer @ Google
series to give you an inside look at each of these programs, hearing from the students themselves who participated. Today Dhruv Maheshwari, a rising sophomore studying computer science and business at the University of Pennsylvania, recaps Google’s
Freshmen Engineering Practicum
internship program. Freshmen Engineering Practicum is summer internship for rising sophomores that provides skills-based training, mentoring and professional development.
Self-driving cars. Bright yellow bikes. Organic pomegranate yogurt. Floor-to-ceiling whiteboards covered in complicated algorithms and/or memes. Happy people. These are a few of the things I saw everyday at Google’s Mountain View campus. As an intern, I was immersed in a community in which each member was eager to share their passion about his or her work and company. For ten weeks, I was able to take part in activities that are all common at Google- brainstorming cutting-edge technologies, discussing industry trends, and philosophizing about various parts of life. Being part of the Freshmen Engineering Practicum program at Google allowed me to experience the most action-packed, productive, enlightening ten weeks of my life.
The Freshmen Engineering Practicum program (or FEP) is an internship for rising sophomores eager to learn about the Google work environment. When I first applied to the program online, I was simply looking for a way to get better at coding; little did I know, what came in the package was an experience of a lifetime. Apart from working on a real software engineering project, I attended weekly classes on various professional topics and and met with a mentor who helped me navigate my way through Google and gave me insightful advice for college. The best part was getting to hang out with what became my FEP family - the other interns, who were some the most quirky, driven, enthusiastic people I’ve ever met. The majority of the freshmen lived together in corporate housing, so each day we would ride the shuttle to work, split up into pods of three or four to our various teams - Ads, Google Earth, Mobile, etc. - and then meet up back in the apartment after work. Having such a diverse group of interns provided for an awesome learning experience; my roommate was an international student from Hong Kong who was happy to share his extensive knowledge of web design with me. We also had the opportunity to march with the Google float in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, dance on a cruise ship in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, and attend the world premiere of the Pixar in Symphony concert!
In addition to all the adventure, the actual coding projects gave us valuable insight into the world of software engineering. Each pod was assigned to a specific team at Google, and had two to three hosts who would guide us through our projects. We started the internship working through Google’s codelabs - tutorials that taught us about many technologies used at Google. After a couple weeks of that, we began our projects working solo or in groups of two or three. As a member of the Dynamic Display Ads team, I worked with a fellow intern to build an external API, which would allow advertising agencies to customize their dynamic ads programmatically (rather than through the existing user interface online). I began the internship with only two semesters worth of programming experience, but by the end, I had a sense of how Google’s entire codebase is managed, how to implement multiple servers in Java, and how to collaborate on a coding project with many moving parts. I was incredibly grateful to have a host such as ours, who was very open to asking us questions and teaching us much more than what was explicitly required for the project. After successfully completing the project, I gained much more confidence in my programming ability, and I’m excited to apply what I learned for my own projects in the years to come.
What impressed me most about this internship was being able to see the unique culture at Google. Despite their brilliance, it seems like each Googler is looking to learn from the other; no one is the “smartest” here. Even as an intern with many, many naive questions, I was treated as someone getting up to speed, rather than as an intern who has to prove himself. This environment only encouraged me to get passed the hurdles of being a Noogler and began contributing as soon as possible. Throughout the entire internship, I was so excited to come to work; I know it will be hard to recreate this experience again!
Interested in Freshmen Engineering Practicum? Apply
here
beginning January 8, 2013 and ending February 1, 2013
Posted by Dhruv Maheshwari, Freshmen Engineering Practicum Intern
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