Journey to my Ph.D.: Happy Turkey Day and things!! :)

Mood: exhausted but excited :)

Hello again!

Sorry I didn't get to update this while in California...it was truly and busy and WONDERFUL experience! :D For anyone who doesn't know, myself, my research advisor, and the student I've been working with went to Mountain View, CA last week (Wednesday - Saturday) to interview developers at the Google headquarters. Now before I get into how successful the interviews were, I would like to say that the Google in Mountain View is everything that I imagined Google to be and so much more! I can't discuss everything on here (some of it is confidentiality issues) but one of the coolest things that I can (and will) mention is that they have bikes (which you will see in my pictures) that they allow their employees to use in order to get around their HUGE campus. They also have their own bus (which is awesome, because traffic and the driving in Cali definitely leaves something to be desired). I think what made the trip was the awesome people we got to meet (and of course the day we got to spend sight-seeing in San Francisco waiting for our flight back home!). I knew that people in technology tend to be much more laid back than those in other areas, but the people are Google are just down right friendly. On top of the awesome people any and everything you could possibly need to do, you can do it right there...there's an eating establishment in EVERY building, there's recreational activities (such as volleyball), there's a fitness center, on site laundry facility...all that's missing is a shower (which I think may be there as well!!). As far as the reason we went, in my opinion it was a pretty huge success. We were able to get 10 Google interviews and 1 from a Mozilla office in Mountain View. The hard part now is going to be going back through these interviews and manually transcribing each... which I am honestly not super excited about. I am super excited, however, about getting to submit my first conference paper! We are writing and trying to submit a paper, based off the interviews we've conducted , to the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) 2012. The only downside is that the paper is due December 17, and because Robert--the guy we met with at Google-- and Google needs to approve our paper before we can try to publish, which means we actually need to have it done by about Dec. 9 (which is much closer than it seems!). Don't get me wrong, I love a challenge, but I think the biggest problem is going to be trying to get this stuff done while also preparing for my exams/finishing up projects and papers. I know I can do this...I'm just honestly really nervous about it. A part of me wishes we could have done this trip like 2 weeks earlier to give more time, but that's slightly irrelevant seeing as we can't go back in time to do so. I'm going to do the best I can (with the help of my awesome partner Yoonki Song) and we'll get something together...and then I'll enjoy the hell outta my Xmas break!

On a brighter note (again), here are some of the pictures from my CA trip (I'll post the OR ones in a separate post just so it's not too confusing)! Enjoy!