Fall Thus Far

So it's been quite a while since I've updated this. Fall has proven to be an extremely busy and tumultuous semester. I'll do my best to enumerate the more important trends here.

I started serving on the Cornell Council on Mental Health and Welfare, convened by Vice President Susan Murphy, and it's been very education so far. I haven't been able to plan en extremely active role in setting the conversation since it's Vice President Murphy, the Director of Mental Health Initiatives, the Deans of the seven colleges, and other various administrators, but I have been able to provide what I hope has been valuable insight from a student's perspective.

Also, on the service train of thought, I'm planning to participate in Alternative Spring Breaks this year. In case you're not familiar with it, Alternative Spring Breaks provide students with the opportunity do charity work during the week we have off during the spring semester. I'm hoping that I'll be able to do something in New York City, either in the Bronx or Manhattan.

I'm also looking to apply for various fellowships an programs. A few weeks ago, I went to an info session on the prestigious UK fellowships like the Rhodes and the Churchill, and then I met with the Cornell Fellowship Coordinator last week, and she thought I would be a viable candidate for any of them. There's not a whole lot I can do for that right now; she said, looking over my resume, "Well, it looks like you're already doing what I would normally advise students to do." So I'll just have to follow up with her next semester and see where to take it from there.

Speaking of studying in the UK, it looks like I'll be spending my second semester of junior year at Oxford studying Computer Science at St. Edmund Hall. I haven't actually done my application yet, but the Cornell Abroad folks seem to think it shouldn't be a problem.

And finally, a bunch of other IS students and I had lunch today with some of the folks from the Undergraduate Admissions Office about how they could better utilize web technologies to engage prospective students. To give a little background, the Director of Admissions, Jason Locke, and I have been talking on and off for the last year or so about how we could work together for the good of Cornell and the Information Science program. The last time we chatted (over lunch at Bamfi), he thought it would be a good idea to get some more IS people together with some of his staff to talk about how they use the web. So that finally came together today, and I think it went really well. I don't want to post to many of the details since it's all very preliminary still, but there were a lot of good ideas. Also, Jason and I are working together to get a single day during the Cornell Days (when prospective student visit in the spring) devoted to Information Science. So he said he'd speak to his staff person in charge of that and get back to me. If we actually pull it off, I think it would be a great way to get more students interested in the major.

Oh, and also as a side note, Nick and I finished the ISSA Resume Book a few days ago, and now we're just waiting to mail it. Thanks to SAFC funding, it looks absolutely beautiful. Hopefully it'll make an excellent impression on employers.

Google from an Intern's Perspective

Almost as long as Google's been around, I've known that one day I'd like to end up working at here. Growing up, I used to read business and technology news almost religiously, and even back then, Google seemed like the coolest company around, somewhere I could imagine myself working.

Fast forward a few years to 2006; I was a freshman Information Science major at Cornell University, and Google was still my dream place to work. I heard from a friend that an alumna from Google was coming back to Cornell to speak. I knew I had to meet her. She was a user experience researcher, something I didn't know much about, but thought might be an interesting field to explore. We started emailing back and forth, and lo and behold, two interviews later, I ended up in sunny Mountain View.

Interning at Google has been more than a dream come true for me; it's been the experience of a lifetime. Just a few days into my internship, I got to speak to Larry and Sergey, the company's co-founders and two of my greatest heroes, at our weekly company-wide meetings. I was blown away by how promising this internship was gearing up to be. 10 weeks in now, all I can say is that Google has definitely lived up to my expectations and all the hype.

I ended up working in user experience research on the Apps side of Google. As a researcher, I investigate ways that our designers, engineers, and product managers can make our products more useful and usable. While I may never get to say too much about what I worked on over my summer vacation, I know the skills and training I'll take away will be useful for the rest of my professional life.

Looking back on my time here, I've learned and grown so much, I couldn't have asked for a better experience.

Half Way Done

I'm officially past the half-way point of my internship, and I'm fairly satisfied with how far I've come so far. The position has been monumentally educational. It's amazing all the things I've picked up on the job. Just yesterday, one of the designers I work with asked me to critique some mocks he made. To think, just a couple months ago, that a designer at Google would ask me for feedback would have been unbelievable (let alone that I would actually have something to say).

I've started to dig pretty deeply into my main intern project. It's challenging but fun at the same time. After working here for a month and a half, I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that I think I would really enjoy the APM (Associate Product Manager) role. A couple of weeks ago I spoke to the staffing coordinator for the program, and since then, I've had lunch with two current APMs. From what they've told me, it sounds like it would be just right for me: getting things done through coordination, organization, and execution.

More Google

On Friday, I went to my first TGIF meeting with the founders of the company, Larry and Sergey. At the end, they took questions, so of course, I asked one. It was beyond cool to talk to the guys who have sort of been my heroes for the last several years. Then today, I got to sit down with Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow in charge of search quality and Cornell alumnus. (He was recently featured in the NYT article about Google.) Google Fellows are Google's top tier engineers; there are only five of them in the entire company, one of whom is widely haled as the Father of the Internet. Amit spoke at Cornell last year, so I figured I'd follow up with him. He seemed really cool, although I couldn't get much information out of him about what he actually does. Oh well, I understand how top secret that stuff is. Still cool to meet him.

Google Update

So my mentor and I have been doing a round of user testing this week, and it's been really interesting. Today, I got to moderate one for the first time, so that was very cool. At first I was pretty nervous, but once I got into it, I think I didn't pretty well. Also, I made a few minor usability suggestions for the product, and it looks like they might be implemented, which would be very cool since something that I came up with would end up being used by tons of people.

Other than that, I really can't say much. Pesky NDA. So much interesting stuff going on inside that I wish I could discuss but can't.

First Week at Google

Well I'm done with my first week of work at Google, and it's been a whirlwind of an experience. Lots of interesting classes ranging from the life of a search query to security and web hacking. As it stands now I'm probably going to be working on the presentations feature of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which is exactly what I wanted when I got here. The only problem is that now that I know about all the cool things they're rolling out, I want to work on a whole host of different projects. We'll see how that turns out.

ISSA Board Meeting

This afternoon the ISSA had its third board meeting with the new board, and I'm all the more optimistic about this board as ever. The goals for today's meeting were to reflect on the events we've done so far as a new board and brainstorm what we'd like to see happen next year. Going in, I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to communicate my vision for the organization, but thankfully, both the board and I are very passionate about what we see in the future for Information Science and the ISSA.

I didn't expect the meeting to go more than an hour, but after two hours, we still hadn't gotten through everything. I was extremely gratified to see that my board had put so much thought into it beforehand, and that we could really work as a team to come up with ideas together. I'm really excited for what next year holds for us.

So as far as my part goes, the next step will be to appropriately delegate tasks to people, and keep up with them to make sure that everything goes well. A lot of the things that I'll personally be working on are more qualitative and long-term, like collaborating for IS programs at other schools and with the ACSU, so I'll have to continue working with that. One of the greatest parts of being the leader of an organization is that I can take the long-term projects that I love, and still have the day-to-day stuff get done through delegation and management.

Another little thing I discovered today was how far a little demonstration of appreciation can go. Since we had a general meeting yesterday, an event the week before, etc, I felt like I might be fatiguing my officers with the constant work. So I decided that I would do a little something special, and pick up some cookies and candy for the meeting. I was pretty surprised by the reaction I got. People were really thankful and, I think, realized that I do in fact appreciate all the work that they do. So that'll probably become a fixture in my board meetings. I'll just have to work on coming up with some new dessert ideas to keep it from getting old.