Tag: Square

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” →

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” →

So, this story is long overdue, but I will post it anyway 😛

I will tell you about how I spent my summer in 2015: Interning at an awesome company called Square in San Francisco! But before I tell you about that, let’s step back a bit to the first time I heard about Silicon Valley (the place, not the TV show). I was in my first year of high school, just beginning to learn how to program with Pascal, and I saw Mr. Sehat Sutardja on Metro TV, talking about his company in Silicon Valley. Curious about the place (partly because of the weird name), I searched around the internet about what kind of place that is. It turns out it’s the place to be for tech people! I also found out about other Indonesians (specifically TOKI alumni) who interned or lived there, mainly Kak Veni, Kak Gogo dan Kak Irvan (yang ini gak tau dulu tau darimana wkwk). Awed by how awesome the place sounds like, I promised myself an irrational dream for a random third-world high school student with no previous achievements: One day, I’m going to be there myself as an intern! Continue reading “San Francisco Summer – pt. 1” →