Googley Summer – pt. 2: The Internship Starts

As I have promised around six months ago (oops), I’m going to tell the story of how I spent Summer 2016: Interning at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California!

Departure

I had the exact same internship start date as my friends Soko (also a Google intern) and Tri (Twitter intern), so we figure we might as well go on our halfway around the world trip (CGK-SFO, minimum transit time is 20hours) together. We decided to fly with Korean Air since it’s cheap compared to other airlines and it’s also a SkyTeam member! As an added bonus, Incheon Aiport (our transit airport) offers a free city tour for international travelers transiting through South Korea with a long layover. As opportunistic college students with 8+ hours to burn in Incheon, of course we signed up for the 5 hour long tour 😀 We went to a traditional village (?), a local market and ate lots of tteokboki and bibimbaps. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Internships

I originally wanted to have a clickbait title before, such as “10 Tips Untuk Magang di Google! Nomor 7 Akan Mencengangkan Kamu!” 😛 (jk I hate those)

Anyways – ever since I got my first internship in San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley, people have been asking me how I got it. This is by no means an easy question to answer off the top of my head, especially since an internship search is a pretty long process. So, after getting the question for the hundredth (?) time and being not satisfied with my answer almost every time, I’m making this blog post to answer the questions once and for all! Just like a good software engineer would, I’m eliminating the repetitive task of answering these questions 😀

Googley Summer – pt. 1

Hi there, just like I promised in my last post, here’s a story about how I spent my summer in 2016: interning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California! In this part, I’ll talk about my experience before the internship starts – applications, interviews, apartment hunting (always crazy in the bay area, lol), etc.

Getting an internship at Google

If you read my previous posts, you know how I spent Summer 2015: Interning at Square! Well, my internship there ended around end of September 2015, but I already started applying to various places for my next internship from around end of August. That way, I can get an internship offer before I get a return offer from Square and have more time to consider offers (PD amat ya, but it works!)

San Francisco Summer – pt. 3

Hi, I’m back after a long hiatus. I thought I can write during my internship this summer at Google, but turns out I got too busy. Sorry 😛

Anyways.

You may wonder what I’ve worked on that summer. Let’s talk a bit about Square. For a normal non-US citizen, you might not know that it’s a name of a company. That’s perfectly normal – I don’t know either, until I applied to work there! Kak Veni, as my mentor, encourages me to apply there as it is a pretty good mid-sized startup. The idea behind Square is to enable any merchant to receive credit card payments. As an Indonesian, you might scoff and think that’s not going to take off. Well, maybe not in Indonesia, but people in the US really love using their cards. I brought a few hundred dollars in cash from Indonesia and barely touched it after getting my US debit card. Cashless transaction is the norm, but the banks take a lot of money from those transactions – and that’s where Square comes along!