I’ve decided to move everything off wordpress.com to my own server. Here’s the link:
yay!
Category: Reflections
As a member of the first graduating class of LinkedIn Interns, I am proud to say that this summer has far exceeded my expectations, and I came already with a high expectation after turning down a few other offers.
I remember when I first left my resume with Doris at the Berkeley spring career fair, I did not expect a follow up. Friday of that week, I received a call during CS 161 lecture. It was from Doris to set up a phone interview. After I hung up, I smiled to myself at how funny she sounded when she realized I was in class. (“ohh I’m so sorry! Go back to class! I’ll stop bothering you now!”) The phone interview with Jon went great. I took the opportunity to get to know a little about LinkedIn and the LED team, of which I would soon be a part.
My on-site interview was what really got me excited. At the time, I was already in love with Rails, and as soon as I heard how extensively LinkedIn uses Rails in Mobile and InApps, I was hooked. I figured from the way Nick spoke and the fact that Alejandro was eating cereal during the interview that the work atmosphere would be rather laid back and flexible. Of course, the free lunch moved LinkedIn to the top of my list.
On the first day of work, I was assigned to a window desk, and was given a beefy Mac Pro, two 24-inch screens, and an ergonomic office chair. Some of the key information I discovered were the locations of the game rooms (note the plural), lunch arrives at 11:30, and sushi every Tuesday. Since sushi is always so high in demand, I would have to line up early for it if I want more than California rolls. Lunch ranges from Dim Sum to Mediterranean and from wraps to Thai. There are also frozen boxes of food and random healthy snacks/bars in case lunch isn’t to taste. The ice cream stocks some amazing varieties too.
Besides delicious food and empowering work, the interns also had fun events. The summer included bowling, Giants game, Go-Karting, Minigolf, basketball games, softball games, Frisbee games, and a soccer match between Engineering and Operations. All events were paid by LinkedIn and were held during work hours!
On the professional growth front, LinkedIn outperforms. Every other week, Jeff, our CEO, would give a presentation to the entire staff on the current events of all aspects of LinkedIn as a company. These meetings were transparent and open to Q/A, which made learning about how a company is run much easier. Once in a while, speakers from other companies like Oracle, Twitter, Facebook, and Last.fm hold interesting tech talks at LinkedIn as well. To top it all off, Interns had the opportunity to chat with a different company executive every other week. Each one of them gave insights in various fields and degree, and each one of them were highly enlightening.
Oh, and I almost forgot the Hackdays and the InDays! Thanks to Adam, hackdays are basically days where cross-functional groups are formed to compete for awesome prizes by creating a ‘hack’, or any type of software. The first hackday gave out iPhone 4s to each of the winners (a total of 7 teams won!), and a $100 Apple giftcard to everyone who participated!
Because of all this, I sometimes drive to Mountain View over the weekend to work on my projects (main project or hackday projects) because it’s just so fun to be at work.
I realize from the way I described my summer, it sounds like I’ve been paid to write this. I assure you that I am sitting on my bed typing on my laptop at 2 in the morning. No one is paying me. My internship ended last Friday, but I’m going back to the office for a one-hour meeting, because I volunteered.
Spending half an hour explaining what the Internet is and how we can’t bring it with us on a camping trip to a whining baby is FRUSTRATING! Try it. How can you put this commonly known, yet less intuitive term in plain English, without using words like “connection”, “network”, or “browser”?
“It’s been 10 years.” has been a phrase I imagined to be confined within the television’s black frame, somewhere far out there. It’s something people say to each other after a horrible dispute, usually between white-haired men with faces full of wrinkles.
Yesterday, these four syllables came from me, and it was not about a dispute at all. In fact, those words came with surprise and emotion when Yanyan found me on Facebook. This entry is dedicated to all of 4C!
I miss childhood innocence. The years I’ve spent in Singapore was carefree. There were none of those hostile and jealousy between so called “friends”, and none of the stress caused by adults that shatter the joy of learning and exploring the natural world… but I shall rant about that another day.
It’s true that my face might have stayed the same for these years, but my heart definitely grew. There are just so much to write and reminisce about that if I were to elaborate in complete English sentences, I might as well have written an autobiography. On a side note, that’s actually not a bad idea. I’ve always wanted to start a family tradition, and this could be it. Everyone in the family must write down what they had done every ten years. Anyways, here’s a list of memories.
- Being in Red House, the House that won sports day every year!
- Chinese orchestra… performing on stage.
- Bossed people around while I was a prefect
- Getting yelled by Ms. Lim everytime I forgot to bring things to school (One time I faked that I was sick during lunch so I can avoid abacus class that afternoon because I forgot to bring my abacus. I think Louis had to sit with me in the hall till the end of that day)
- Playing badminton and marbles with Kiathow and Bingliang
- Going to Edward’s house every afternoon until his mom got angry at me.
- Serving as class monitor for half a year (?) with Yanyan
- Helping Xianling with physics and math homework
- Drawing on people’s erasers
- Cleaning up the classroom (class duty?) with my group. (Pretended I didn’t know how to sweep the floor so I can make other people do it)
- Thinking Xueying was weird for have black as her favorite color
- Playing with PowerPoint in the computer lab
- Getting free toys from the lunch uncle that sold yogurt
- Feeding peacocks rubber band (I think it died the next week… not sure if it was because of the rubber band)
- One dollar chicken rice for lunch
- Learning sign language
- Party at JiaYong’s house and racing mini 4WD cars on his track (He also gave me a keychain that was a pig eating a cake on my birthday)
- Naughty Louis. I’m glad he grew up!
- Guowei Lau…sai :D
- Called Maychew heavy on fitness day because she weighed more than I did. (Ms. Lim yelled at me after that, but I think Maychew didn’t care)
- Having the same birthday as Jonathan
- Breaking the piano in the music room
- “Animal toilet” hide out
- Hanging out with Lixuan
- Taking the school bus home with Jengyang
P.S. Sorry for not writing more letters and stay in touch. I’ve never forgotten you all though!
It has become totally obvious to me the main reason I study. Why do I bury myself in textbooks, stacks of binder papers, some stationery, and a 15.4 inch LCD screen littered with wikis, when I could go out there and hang out with friends, or at the minimum just lie on my bed and do nothing? I have no intent in keeping my parents happy with my grades, and no interest in bragging about them. I keep myself constantly busy to bury memories and events that I’d like to forget. For some reason, I had thought that not thinking about something is the best way to escape making a decision. Through these months away from home, reality hit multiple times. Each time, the feeling can be described as being stoned by hobos in the middle of the day: outrageous, aggrieved, and irritated.
What would I do during finals week, when I absolutely have to study, yet I had just come to the conclusion that I need to deal with current events on time. If only there are serializers in real life.
Berkeley. That word used to have so many different meaning. Mysterious, gloomy, an institution for super smart young minds to be educated by Stalin-like figures in a totalitarian method twenty-six hours a day, eight days a week, because clearly that’s how they do it in Soviet Russia.
Its meaning became increasingly dynamic since school progressed. Now it stands for lethal physics problems and mind-blowing CS ideas, daily greasy buffet and delicious chicken strips, synchronized showers and homework time, irregular sleeping and eating patterns, events with lots of free goodies and food, daily brawl battles and hall sports, and everything exciting yet stressful inclusive. As the first midterms approach, the first ones among countless other ones to come, leisure time became inversely proportional to study time. No longer do I have time for dota, sports, and *gasp* Facebook. Life became a simple sleep-eat-break-study cycle tainted by constant pressures – the pressure from parents to get a good GPA, the pressure from friends to hang out, and my inner pressure to deal with other issues.
The hero’s journey does not stop at simply passing the threshold and reaping the fruit of labor, but cycles back to the call of another adventure. After all, one can only bask in ones own glory so long before that glory becomes the norm, and hopefully life is not the norm but a cycle built on top of rife challenges.
