5 min read
I heard some surprising feedback yesterday from my host. Instead of ramping up to meet the end of the internship deadline, I should be winding down because there's not much left to do. A couple of the big things I had to do were also on other teammates' to-do lists so they actually took things on themselves even though I offered to do the tasks. Pretty much now I have to add proper unit tests for one thing and possibly one last bit of logic to a component.
During our weekly meeting, my manager was more interested in getting me ready for the interviews than discussing my project. He even offered to do a mock interview on the spot but I didn't feel prepared or well-rested enough to do one. My mentor says that's a really good sign because that means he thinks I have a shot at getting an offer with proper preparation.
I was also advised to pick another day soon to do a mock interview with my manager so I picked next Tuesday. I also had 2 Googlers who I don't know sign up to give me mock interviews so it would feel like the real thing so I picked 2 days on my second-to last week as a "dress-rehearsal" as my mentor put it, and I'm doing several other mock interviews before that with people I know.
Today was also the day of my first mock interview with my mentor since that would be the least stressful. Problem was that around 3 PM I started getting a migraine. I had a meeting with one of the intern coordinators who wanted to check in and see how I was doing with my internship at 4 PM in 5BB. I arrived a minute early, saw the line for coffee and thought, "I bet some caffeine would help, that's what Excedrin has in it".
As soon as I stepped into the line the barista told me they were closed. Of all the times to be deprived of coffee (and I'm not a habitual coffee-drinker), this was probably the worst one. I actually went to sleep at 1 AM the night before with the intent of waking up at 10 AM. My mentor was telling me since I was in a random bad mood half of Monday and Tuesday that one of the things that helps is setting an alarm late so you wake up naturally and in a better mood. Well I woke up naturally alright -- at 4 AM. I couldn't fall back asleep either.
Coffeeless, I had my 20-minute meeting and got to discuss how my internship is going. She was surprised to hear that I was already almost done with my project with 3.5 weeks remaining. She said projects, although designed to be completed within the internship, are usually challenging enough that they aren't -- working 40 hours a week, that is. I'm ahead of schedule since I work 60 hours a week.
She was also surprised to hear I didn't have a single complaint about my time at Google. After explaining how last internship went with the small fragmented "team" of only 3 tech interns, sitting in the middle of noisy customer service, having to show up not a minute later than 9 and not leave a minute before 5, and not having free food, this was the greatest internship I could have asked for. I crossed FIVE things off my bucket list because of working here.
At the end of the meeting we discussed conversion and interviews. I was told to treat it as more of a formality for making a hiring decision than the single deciding factor of if I'm fit to be an FTE. We shared stories about overprepping for Google interviews and in the end I left feeling a little less nervous about the process. It's just that everyone puts so much emphasis on doing at least 3 mock interviews that it's making me worried.
I had my first one today with my mentor after trying to nap off the migraine in a nap pod. It only took the edge off of it by a little so I showed up to his workstation not feeling terribly up to a mock interview. Nevertheless, we grabbed scooters and were off across the 15th floor to find a room with a decent-sized whiteboard since we didn't book a room ahead of time.
Eventually we found one and I stood there with a marker in one hand and applying pressure to the left side of my skull with the other as he explained the problem:
"Given a list of strings, find if they are all unique.""Oh good, I don't have to think on this one," I said to myself and explained that it's just a trivial hashset problem and how it would work before jumping into scribbling some Java on the board. Aside from neither of us realizing that I used HashMap's get and put methods instead of HashSet's contains and add methods, the solution was right, clean, and optimal.
Right afterwards, we scootered back to Google Ideas and met up with 2 other people from 15 to go to dinner with before watching the second LOTR movie. I was in a better mood this time and got to explain to another FTE about some machine learning stuff I've done in the past, my current thesis, and my internship project. The movie was good too and seemed shorter even though it was over 3 hours like the last one.
After leaving the office after midnight from hanging around for the after-movie discussion, hopefully tonight I'll actually sleep more than 3 hours.