Google Student Blog: Getting to know a research intern: Cathy Wong

Student Blog

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

Getting to know a research intern: Cathy Wong

March 19, 2018

Google Research tackles the most challenging problems in CS and related fields. Being bold and taking risks is essential to what we do, and research teams are embedded throughout Google, allowing our discoveries to affect billions of users each day.Cathy Wong

Left: Cathy; Right: her fellow intern

Can you tell us about yourself and your masters topic?How did you get to work in this area?Why did you apply for an internship at Google and how supportive was your masters advisor?
What project was your internship focused on?Multitask Neural Model SearchNeural Architecture SearchDid you publish at Google during your internship?ICMLon ArxivHow closely connected was the work you did during your internship to your masters topic?Did you write your own code?cavalierlyThis is your third internship at Google. What were the reasons to come back to Google Zurich? [Editor’s note: the photo referenced is the photo at the beginning of this post!]

What key skills have you gained from your time at Google?
My team held a weekly reading group, where we’d gather to read and discuss cutting-edge AI papers chosen by different members of the team. This turned out to be one of the very best experiences of the internship — it was incredibly helpful to step back and get a better sense of what’s happening within a very rapidly changing field. Listening to colleagues step through these papers helped me learn to more rigorously assess any given paper — to ask what the experiments really mean, and how its conclusions could generalize to our own current and future projects. Those are questions that I’ve tried to ask more about any work since the summer. That commitment to keeping up with the very coolest things happening within the field also just serves to remind me, often, of what exactly I love about this work and how much there is left to tackle.

What impact has this internship experience had on your master's?
A ton. I really enjoyed diving deeply into research that was largely outside of my own master’s expertise. So much is changing within reinforcement learning right now, and I’ve definitely brought back what I learned — and a sparked interest in related work — to my research here.

Looking back on your experiences now: Why should a master's student apply for an internship at Google? Any advice to offer?
There’s a kind of magical combination of people and resources that means you can work and learn so much within so short a time — especially if you love research and haven’t yet done a PhD, like myself. The internship offers that same rigor and breadth of very cool projects in a very compressed package.

When you’re here, definitely ask questions. Talk to other people about their research, because it’s going to be very awesome and maybe even directly relevant. Join a reading group. Or start a reading group. And get someone to show you how to actually use the espresso machines. That milk frothy thingie? Life changing.