6 min read
Today was the day that I officially scheduled my onsite interviews for my last Tuesday at Google. After talking with my mentor as usual during our Monday morning meeting, I was was reminded that I still had to do that so I asked my recruiter for anytime in the afternoon. I thought they would be on separate days but they ended up being back-to-back. In fact, there was no break at all planned, I actually specifically had to ask for a 15 minute break between rounds in case I have to do a brief mental recovery like I did for my internship interviews after the first one kind of went like a trainwreck. Now I have 3 weeks for my anxiety levels to hit new all-time highs.
Normal person's reaction to seeing a flying roach for the first time
I've already kicked off my study-thon with this past weekend. I went over to the office around 6 after eating dinner and stayed overnight. I alternated between coding on the whiteboard in an actual interview room and just sitting in a massage chair writing out code with pen and paper. I'm fine when it comes to string, array, stack, or queue problems, but if there's one thing I hate it's graph/tree problems. I haven't looked at graph problems since last fall and my knowledge of different flavors of trees is severely lacking because why would we cover such things in school? It's too advanced for the course or there just isn't enough time. Probably the latter.
Although I spent several hours practicing, I still have a lot of work to do and several mock interviews to actually do before the real ones. I also have a workshop to go to on Thursday for conversion. All this time and energy that I'm putting into this is going to make this really suck all the more if it doesn't work out. My mentor says the penalty of not having a successful conversion is exactly the same as not doing it at all but I'd beg to differ. I'd be sleeping soundly and a lot more knowing I didn't have to worry about this and could just keep cruising towards my last day. But if this works out then I don't have to panic all of senior year as I've already got a job waiting for me -- and a pretty good one at that.
Although I would have prefered to do more studying and thus minimize the chance of royally screwing up my interviews, I had made plans to watch LOTR from last Wednesday's bizarre late lunch. The group that was going to watch the movie planned to all meet in Hemispheres at 6:30 so I managed to pull myself away from my desk a few minutes before then.
I seem to be losing my ability to deal with large crowds because after a minute of being in Hemispheres after arriving around 6:32 (6:30 is the instant it opens and people actually arrive early and wait), I just weaved my way through to the desserts since that was empty as people were waiting in line for real food, grabbed a couple things, then went to the almost deserted Truck Pit Cafe next to Hemispheres to wait until the crowd died down.
Another intern saw me sitting by myself and came over to sit down. He saw I had only a couple small pieces of dessert and no real food and offered some of his potatoes while I waited. Eventually a couple other interns joined in and sat down. A little later the movie group showed up and I went to sit with them. I don't know what my issue was, but I wasn't terribly interested in the conversation at the time although I normally would have been.
Later at 7:30 we went up to the 11th floor to Drive-In to watch the movie. One of the interns had never heard of a drive-in so someone was explaining it's a place to watch movies on a giant screen in your car but apparently it also has another meaning someone started to bring up but then my mentor was like "let's not go there".
We ended up spending 20 minutes just sitting in the room waiting for a missing intern who went looking for popcorn to show up. Other people went missing looking for the missing intern or just wandering around. I had gotten an email regarding yet another round of comments on one of my outgoing CLs so I was kind of antsy that I was in the office but unable to respond to any of them without my laptop. I stayed put though because I didn't want to miss the movie although in hindsight I probably could have went back to my office, addressed the comments, sent them out, and went back to the 11th floor without missing anything.
The movie itself was long. Don't get me wrong, there were some comedic moments, but for some reason I just wasn't terribly entertained. We watched the extended edition of The Fellowship of The Ring so it was over 3 hours long. I'm a bit against movies that are that long, even Avatar was a bit too long in my opinion. Halfway through the movie I felt like just getting up and leaving and getting back to work but that probably would have concerned my mentor since he wasn't even sure if I was having fun to begin with.
He knows I've hit the point of the internship that I just want to go home. That actually finally hit me last week. I need a break from the city. I was never a city person to begin with, my hometown only has about 15K people (my original hometown in the middle of nowhere had a little over 1K people, but then again Plainfield is in the middle of nowhere too). I think if I was offered a job at Google but if and only if I went to the New York office, I'd have to spend time debating it. This is a great office to work in and THE best company to work for but the city and I don't get along well.
I'm kind of hoping the next 4 weeks go by quickly just so I can get back to Connecticut. I miss fresh air and the smell of petrichor. I think I've had enough of the big city life to last me for several years.