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After a giddy Monday, I've been completely sapped of energy for the past 2 days. I felt like a zombie walking to work Tuesday morning. Even just walking my 9 short block commute was a struggle. I felt like I was getting sick and ended up skipping lunch that day. Right after what time I was supposed to have my normal lunch I had a meeting with my mentor to go over my progress so far.
Somehow I'm actually ahead of schedule, which was the complete opposite of what I thought. I'm so ahead that I'm almost "code-complete" for the internship supposedly. Due to a miscommunication, what I was supposed to accomplish for the duration of the internship was much smaller than what I had understood from the project description and meetings. This project was meant for a team to work on and I was just supposed to get it started off.
It's a good thing I heard this now rather than at the end of the internship, but brute-forcing my way through the first half the internship doesn't look very good. I was told by a past 2-time intern to focus on getting something actually working so I focused on the end goal alone and not on the process at all. So now I've switched gears and refuse to ask for any code reviews without first getting a design document thoroughly looked at and modified if necessary (which takes extra time initially but probably saves a lot of time if it's implemented right the first time).
Trying to make up for the first half... Okay it's actually not that bad but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
My mentor said this actually puts me in a good position because now I can show improvement. I still think the damage has already been done. Besides, I've never had an instance of a project in which I needed to thoroughly document something, get the idea and implementation approved, and only then actually code it up. (Nope, not even in 2102. My group changed literally 1 line of code in an open source project and we all got A's. Somehow.)
Due to the blunder that was the first half, I lost a few hours of sleep last night wondering if it's even worth it to convert to full-time. Even the famous mind-controlled drone project was hardly designed. This was the horrifying ah-ha moment when I tried to actually think of something I did that didn't just involve me smashing my head into a wall until my code worked. That's just what I've always done in school and -- surprise -- that's not the kind of people who get hired full-time here.
Day 59: Somehow they still haven't noticed...
Then I got the same old talk on impostor syndrome that I hear at least twice a year yet I disagree with literally every time regardless of how much I changed from the last time I heard it. I was told to just try to get a full-time role anyway even though after actually working here for 2 months I don't feel ready to get an offer. Once my supervisor from the lab told me to let Google decide if I was ready to work there so I guess I'm just going to have to do the same thing again.