Category: Life Story

Googley Summer – pt. 2: The Internship Starts

rakina2 Comments

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.  Continue reading “Googley Summer – pt. 2: The Internship Starts” →

Googley Summer – pt. 1

rakina1 Comment

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!)

Continue reading “Googley Summer – pt. 1” →

San Francisco Summer – pt. 3

rakina3 Comments

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!

Continue reading “San Francisco Summer – pt. 3” →

San Francisco Summer – pt. 2

rakina7 Comments

My internship at Square starts on July 6th, and I arrived at San Francisco on July 4th(!!)

Other interns start around May-June, and I’m the last incoming summer intern. Why am I so late? Well, to be an international intern at the United States of America, you need to be at least 18 years old, and I was born on June 26th, 1997. My internship almost got canceled because of my age, but my awesome recruiter, Veronica, devised a plan for a later start date exclusively for me just as I was about to bury my dream :’)  I sent her a big thanks email on the last day of my internship, sadly we never did talk in person 😦

Continue reading “San Francisco Summer – pt. 2” →