Most people start their study abroad blogs with their first day in a new country, but I wanted to start mine by telling everyone about my summer. I just ended one of the best summers of my life and I cannot start a blog without noting some of the things I did before I leave for Budapest. I spent my summer working for Google at their Cambridge, MA office. When I got a call offering me a summer internship at Google I’m not sure I processed what was happening until I had an ID picture taken and a “Noogler” hat stuck on my head. I have always been a little nervous about working for big corporations and had some reservations about “selling my soul” to Google. After I met the people who worked there I realized quickly that Google could not possibly be trying to do anything evil. Google’s ideas are all about giving information to everyone in the world, creating exciting new technologies, and empowering people to solve interesting, hard problems. Working there all summer was a dream.
My project was well-suited to what I love doing, education technology. I worked on a small team at Google to add new features on David Bau’s Pencil Code site. Pencil Code is a blocks-to-text and text-to-blocks based programming environment that supports coffeescript, javascript, HTML, and CSS. My job this summer was to help build a visual debugger that helped to explain how the code you create on Pencil Code actually works. We made a youtube video about our work. You can also play with our demo site at pencil.codes. And, of course feel free to check out pencilcode.net and learn something about programming!
I spent the majority of my time this summer working as an intern for Google, and eating at my favorite restaurants in Cambridge too often. Besides working, I fell in love with writing poetry, hanging out with new and old friends, and walking around Boston. I could sit in Boston common and eat Mike’s Pastry with a good friend every day and never get sick of it. That’s how this summer went. I coded all the time, ate great food, explored the city and never got sick of it all. It was likely because I spent my time with such amazing people. It seems like a miracle when I think about how many of the other interns this summer turned into fast friends.
This summer was great and went by really fast. I even traveled to the Googolplex for a Women Engineers Intern Summit, and went to Ottawa, Canada for the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security to present my work from a computer science course at Wellesley. It was exciting to get to travel and meet new people. I had never been to Canada or California before and it was cool to see a couple new places when I was spending the rest of my time in some place I had been for a while. Even though I had started calling Boston home I saw a lot of new things in town this summer. I ate at the Gourmet Dumpling House in Chinatown (I found out where Chinatown was), I sat in the Boston Gardens and wrote poetry, I played for Boston’s Ultimate frisbee hat league, I went sailing in the harbor, I discovered Flour’s breakfast sandwich (you should try it), and I found the beauty that is the Christian Science Museum’s Mapporium. There is so much more I could say about my summer in America’s first city, but I will just close out my summer by saying that I learned you could have an amazing, new adventure in a place that you already thought you knew most things about.
After I left the people and places I love in Boston I went home. First to my Aunt’s house in North Carolina just to hang out for a couple days, second to my best friends’ house in Norman to see them, and finally to where I grew up in Ada to go through my childhood room, hang out with my grandmother, and spend some time with my mom. Home to me is many places, and I’m so happy to spend some time in Oklahome before I fly away to make a new home in Budapest.
Great job, Cali!. Can't wait to hear from Budapest!!
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