Work: Just Google It

For the past two summers, I have been fortunate enough to secure two awesome summer internships at Google: one in summer 2007 in New York City and one in summer 2008 in Mountain View, California. The first summer I worked on the Google Checkout API team and wrote an internal tool to help QA testers, test the efficiency of

Checkout. I had complete ownership of the code I wrote, and was able to design and develop how I saw fit. Because
of this, I felt like I really accomplished something. When I started, I knew almost none of the technology I needed
to, but was able to learn it all on the job. Of course there’s ridiculous amounts of free food all over the place—lunch,
dinner, snacks, everything—but more importantly the primary mode of transportation inside the New York office was

Razor scooters which I raced other interns around the office on ( spectacularly wiping out a few times). It
was a lot of fun. While the internship itself was awesome, the best part about working that summer was the location
in the middle of Manhattan, as I was able to work and play in what is perhaps the best city in the US. I got to do
the entire tourist scene, but also got the benefit of living in the city; every night after work, I could experience dozens of restaurants and go out to experience the nightlife. As another plus, I found an apartment close to the office, so I was able to walk to work every day. This past summer, I was in Mountain View (a town about an hour south of San Francisco).

Although the previous summer in New York was cool, this summer was even better. I worked as a Software Engineer intern on the Platforms team—the team that actually works on the low level software and hardware design of Google’s servers. My job was to work on a hard drive security tool that secured hard drives to prevent read and writes to the drive in order to protect user data.

Again, I had a tremendous amount of fun, and it was really cool to have ownership of such a significant project. However, I didn’t get everything right the first time. I was running the tool on a couple hundred machines in the Atlanta data center and accidently rebooted them while the test of was running, effectively “bricking” the machines so they could not be booted. I was able to fix them, but I had a realization right after I restarted the machines and had to place a call to a data center technician and apologize profusely, as he would have to individually restart these
several hundred machines by hand (a process which would take several hours, at the least). In the end however, I had two fantastic experiences and would definitely encourage all students to try sto get internships of their own.