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Diary of a Summer Intern - Rio
August 30, 2012
“So when’s your last day again?”
I pause for a moment, hoping that by delaying the answer I also delay the inevitable truth that I’ve hoped would never come. The flurry of goodbye emails in my inbox from the other interns don’t hide the fact that at some point I have to do the same, too. Being an intern means that a semester of school and classes are waiting for me back in the United States. It will be exciting to be back at work at school, but I still need some time to context switch, if you know what I mean!
Rio with fellow interns Oscar (left) and Rodrigo (right)
There are so many things to look back upon this summer, and there’s no denying that the people I worked with make a large part of the powerful experience that comes with working at Google. Everyone at Google works to make things better for their users, even if it means staying up late to fix a bug or responding to an email. At the end of the day, though, I think what will remain with me the most is the feeling that I had of always being on the edge of my seat - every day I could come in to work with the knowledge that something awesome would get done by the end of the day - if not by me, then by someone else on my team or in the office. That fast cycle of high calibre innovation is extremely inspiring. And working at the scale of Google means being entrusted with a lot of responsibility, even as an intern!
One of the things that I’ve really appreciated as an intern working in Tokyo is that even with the time difference between here and Mountain View, working at Google makes that gap feel small. In fact, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with offices in Bangalore, New York, San Bruno, London (and with the other
Diary of A Summer Interns
Jess
in Pittsburgh and
Franklin
in Zurich!) all with the click of a button and
amazing video technology
. (It’s the same technology that allowed me, sitting in Tokyo, to
watch Google I/O
live from San Francisco). Just remember, though - it’s (
almost!
) really tough to schedule an office meeting with people from San Francisco, Zurich and Tokyo at the same time, because those time zones span a full 16 hours!
The past couple of weeks have been busy with rolling out other YouTube captions-related features and doing a lot of impact analysis, to make sure that the features do actually get used. After all, the best features are the ones that are the most useful, the ones that users say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted!” One thing I’ve noticed is that it's easy to want to change the way a webpage or feature looks -- but
how
to introduce the new designs/features (so people react positively) is also really important.
Aside from work, I helped put together and present a feature on interns at the Tokyo office at our Friday social get-together, TGIF. It’s really neat to be able to see what the other interns in the office are working on. I also attended a
Mystery Lunch
, in which Googlers from around the office get randomly selected into groups to have lunch together. I also gave a lightning talk on some of my summer work, which is quite the challenge because you’re only allowed five minutes to present!
They say the best way to learn from the best is to be among them. I will miss the countless people who made me feel welcome, who encouraged me along the way, and who pushed me to tackle big problems. I can only hope that many more people try and apply for internships at Google, because we know there isn’t any shortage of big problems to solve!
皆さん、お疲れさまです！またいつか会いましょう！
Fun Google Fact:
Did you know there are at least 30 different internships roles at Google, and that this summer’s intern class included (at least one) Google Doodle intern and one industrial design intern? How cool is that?
Posted by Jessica Safir, University Programs
Diary of a Summer Intern - Rio
August 13, 2012
It’s launched!
One of my photos of the fireworks display from the
27th Kanagawa-Shimbun
Fireworks Festival
Those words defined the start of the fireworks display that I watched from the Tokyo oceanfront piers last week. Fireworks are a traditional Japanese summer activity and occur nearly every weekend in August all across town. Those words also accompanied the unveiling of a new feature I've worked on at YouTube. For me, the two words also mixes excitement and anticipation about sharing a new feature for YouTube’s global audience—
online caption editing
.
This feature expands on YouTube’s caption management system, letting you make edits and changes directly to captions online instead of making an entirely new caption file. And the work doesn’t end with the launch - I have to monitor user feedback and logs to confirm that people are actually using the tool.
A week ago, I traveled to YouTube's San Bruno headquarters to meet with the team—including those who work on YouTube player and the folks that help video creators manage their library. When you handle
72 hours of video uploaded every minute
and 4 billion hours of video watched by users per month, there’s a significant impact that a single improvement can have, and lots of priorities to juggle. For example, my project required me to work with user experience designers to craft an intuitive workflow, coordinate efforts to ensure that engineering goes smoothly, and test the end features to make sure they work for users. To me, it felt like trying to be a concert conductor in a noisy field.
I could only understand about 20% of what this elderly gentleman was saying
because he had a strong accent, but he survived the tsunami that destroyed his
village. Everyone from the village survived, fortunately.
On a non-work related note, one of the most memorable things to happen during my couple months interning at YouTube was a trip to the northern part of Japan, which was ravaged by last year’s earthquake and tsunami and is still trying desperately to recover.
GoogleServe
is a project that lets Googlers take time off to participate in volunteering activities, but with everyone’s busy schedules, we decided this year to have the volunteer work occur over the weekend. We jumped into a chartered overnight bus to Matsushima, where we spent two days helping fishermen by collecting bamboo shoots for raftmaking material, tying ropes, and stacking shells that serve as the feeding spot for oysters. There was opportunity to listen to folks from the community, which reminded me that there was still so much do in the northern part of Japan. Currently, we’re trying to see if there are ways Googlers can use their technology know-how to provide long terms sustainability to the region.
- Rio
Fun Google Fact:
GoogleServe started in 2008 as an employee initiative and has since become a “Global Week of Service”. This year over 5,000 Google employees donated their time to everything from computer literacy and refurbishing computers to beach cleaning and Hangouts on Air with students from around the world. You can see a video from one of the first
projects
in 2008 out of the Milan office where employees helped paint goalposts with kids.
Posted by Jessica Safir, University Programs
Diary of a Summer Intern - Rio
July 19, 2012
The Tokyo summer heat brings just enough of a breeze to ring my neighbor’s wind chime on his balcony but it’s not enough to stop the unbearable humidity from transforming into sweat. The onset of summer here coincides with my halfway point as an intern at Google, and what a ride it’s been! I even had the chance to experience my first earthquake at the office!
As part of my effort to learn about what it means to be a product manager at Google, I’ve made it a point to meet 3 different people for lunch per week and ask them what they thought made a good product manager. I really like the advice Ken Tokusei, the Director for Search, gave me. He said to imagine where you want to be when your feature launches, and then to work back from there.
One might imagine that all you need to launch a feature is to make it, but there’s people to reach out to and a lot of priorities to weigh each feature against - is this going to have the most amount of impact? Is it going to take a lot of effort to launch? Who needs to review it and approve it? What sort of UI changes does this require? Does it make business sense?
Being an APM also means having a very close ear to the ground, and listening to what users are saying and reacting to. The product forums are a great way to monitor feedback and reactions. Interestingly, there are two kinds of people who react to captions on YouTube: those who have no idea they exist, and those who use them prolifically as a way to reach deaf and hearing-impaired users.
I also try to find ways to get involved in different Google events. I pulled an all-nighter to watch the
2012 Google I/O keynote
livestreamed from the Tokyo office, simultaneously translated into Japanese for 100 invitees. The
Google Glass demo
was at 3 in the morning, but no one could sleep through all that excitement and adrenaline!
One of the memorable highlights so far outside the Google office was participating in an intern offsite trip to Mount Fuji. The trip was almost canceled as a result of bad weather, but due to a series of remarkable good luck, most of us made it to the top. We even managed to
host a Google+ Hangout
from about 10,000ft up!
The Tokyo office also welcomed the other Associate Product Manager intern, Aki, who is working with the Chrome team. He’s actually also from Stanford, and we often catch breakfast together.
- Rio
Fun Google Fact:
The floor I’m on at the Google office has conference rooms named after the train stops on the Yamanote train line in the same exact order (since the rooms are essentially in a loop around the building, and the train line is also a giant loop). The Yamanote line carries almost as much passengers on its single line every day as the entire New York subway system does in the same time!
Posted by Jessica Safir, University Programs
Diary of a Summer Intern - Rio
June 28, 2012
Hi everyone!
皆さん、初めまして。APMインターンの赤阪です！
The characters on the divider say ぐーぐる”(Google)
but look like steam coming out of a bath."
It’s been three weeks since I’ve started my internship at Google and it’s already a whirlwind of endless activity - every day gives me an opportunity to discover something new about what it means to be an Associate Product Manager (APM) at Google and what it’s like to work in the Tokyo office.
I often get the question-
what does an APM intern do
? Over the past several weeks I’ve come to learn that it means being a particularly ardent and persistent advocate of a particular product or feature. This requires also knowing a lot about the product in order to be able to make the right kinds of decisions about what features to launch and what to shelve. It also means coordinating and facilitating dialogue about what other stakeholders in the product think - which often means doing Hangouts with people in Mountain View! I’m working on
YouTube’s captions feature
with Brad, who is my mentor and who has helped me familiarize myself with all things related to YouTube, captions and the awesome team here.
What’s particularly exciting about working on captions is that I’ve always championed the notion that we should have greater accessibility online. Google's mission is to “make the world's information universally accessible” so I truly feel like the work I'm doing is a direct impact on these efforts. Captions help people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing understand the dialog and audio cues within a video. YouTube already integrates great features that let speech recognition technology automatically generate captions, but there is a lot that Google can continue doing and improve! It’s really motivating to be part of that process.
There’s so much else that enlivens my work day at Google Tokyo, not merely the fact that I can see
Tokyo Tower
from my desk! I really enjoy hanging out with the other interns here and hearing about their own projects, and the first weekend after I started, a couple of us went to the
Tsukiji fish market
to see the tuna auctions. We had to wake up at 3 in the morning, but it was very much worth the trip. I also help coordinate efforts to send Googlers to the northern part of Japan to volunteer in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami from last year.
Until next time!
-
Rio
Fun Google Fact:
One of the floors at the Google Tokyo office is designed to look like a Japanese public bath (onsen), complete with fabric dividers and a giant wall with a painting of Mount Fuji! There’s also a secret
koi
pond somewhere in the office!
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