Tag: Google

Daily Log: CHI2013 Day 4

May 17, 2013 / kateringland / 0 Comments

So, I’ve finally found time to write my last day of CHI entries. I was sad to see CHI be over, but on the other hand, four days of solid conference is a lot of conference.

I first attended Vint Cerf‘s talk in the morning (he was one of the inventors of the internet). I thought the whole talk was interesting. He discussed how everything is now going on the internet and it’s important that standards be created so everything can talk to each and talk to the aliens when they come to visit from outer space. The best part of his talk, however, was when he ended the first part of his talk and launched into the necessities of accessibility. Now this just happens to be my area of interest. And apparently, not enough people are interested, unfortunately.

Vint Cerf talks about Computer Conversations

Star Trek and Ubiquitous Computing, Talking to a Mouse

Vint Cerf at the Podium

Slide on Accessibility

I then went the session on Autism. I enjoyed listening to all the papers presented. The first (Why Do They Still Use Paper? Understanding Data Collection and Use in Autism Education by Marcu et al.) covered why teachers and caretakers in schools were still using paper to keep track of all the student records. Basically it comes down to: there is no really good software solution yet for schools. The second paper (TOBY: Early Intervention in Autism through Technology by Venkatesh et al.) was about the Toby Play Pad, which is an app that is meant as an early intervention tool when parents find out their child is autistic. It targets four developmental areas: sensory, imitation, language (receptive and expressive), and social (eye gaze, joint attention). The third paper (Evaluation of Tablet Apps to Encourage Social Interaction in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders by Hourcade et al.) was on a method to evaluate tablet apps for encouraging social interaction. The fourth paper (Investigating the Use of Circles in Social Networks to Support Independence of Individuals with Autism by Hong et al.) was about social media and using social networks to support youth with autism. This helps shift the burden off over-reliance on the primary caregiver and spreads it around to other people in the youth’s social circles.

In the afternoon, I also attended a panel with Vint Cerf discussing accessibility and what’s currently being done. It’s nice to know some big names in computing are concerned about this and maybe it will get more attention this way.

Finally, here is a slide show of the rest of Paris, in case I don’t get around to a post about that part of my trip:

On Getting Into Grad School, Part 3

April 13, 2013 / kateringland / 0 Comments

Have you read Part 2 yet?

October 2012: More Traveling Fun

Amidst getting through my senior year classes (which were amazingly more difficult than my previous courses), I traveled some more in the fall. At the beginning of October I went to the Grace Hopper 2012 Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. I had been given a scholarship to attend, all expenses paid. It was great because I was traveling with some of my friends from the west coast. We all stayed in the same hotel and I got to show them a little bit of Baltimore (like the train from the airport to downtown).

At Grace Hopper, I was sure to visit the booths of some of the schools I was planning on applying to. It was nice to connect up with people I had made connections with the previous year and with those I had made connections with over the summer.

Later in October, I attended ASSETS 2012 in Boulder, CO. This conference was a lot smaller than anything else I had been to, but it was definitely worth the trip. Here again, I connected up with people from the summer and learned a lot about the assistive tech scene. It was sort of an affirmation that this was the field that I wanted to go into and was proof that it was a viable field to go into. I think one of the best parts was going to dinner with Amy and Michele (that I worked with over the summer) and getting all sorts of advice on how to proceed with my grad school application process. It was a lot more information in one evening than I had ever gotten from anyone at my home institution. I am glad to have made these connections and definitely don’t want to ever turn up the opportunity in the future to make more connections like these.

November 2012: Wrapping Up the Semester and the Applications

By the time I came home from ASSETS I was ready to finish up my applications and get everything done. I had a much stronger idea of what to write for my personal statements and a stronger overall story for the application package. I spent the rest of November writing all the different personal statements and starting to turn in my applications. For the most part, I was able to get all of my applications done by the first of December. This gave me a little breathing room before finals. While the majority of the applications were due December 15^th, I didn’t want to be trying to turn them all in last minute.

It was at the beginning of November that my first paper (I was second author) got presented at a conference. The conference was in Taiwan, so I didn’t have the funds to go, but it was still exciting to have a paper published.

December 2012: This is the End?

I got all my applications done before finals and wrapped up the semester completely exhausted. And broke. Did I mention how much money this whole process ended up costing? I’m a little scared to actually tally up the total, so I won’t. But it was a lot. It was probably in the neighborhood of $1000 after application fees, GRE tests, and transcript requests.

Then the worst part of the entire process began. The waiting.

Knowing that my entire future was in the balance and that the outcome of these applications would determine where I would be living and what I would be doing in less than a year was completely nerve-wracking. And it wasn’t just my life I was messing with- it was also my husband’s.

January 2013: Dealing with Rejection

Luckily, schools were on the ball and started culling their applications by mid-January. I got a couple of rejections right away. While this was a bit discouraging, I had mentally prepared myself for such occurrences. And a rejection was much better than not knowing at all.

But I didn’t have much time to feel sorry for myself or worry too much because I was also keeping myself busy with school and MORE travel! I was prepping at this point to head to the Tapia Conference in Washington, DC. I was to present a poster on work I had done in the fall for my professor.

Right before I left for the conference I found out that I had a phone interview with UC Irvine the Monday after I got back. While I was very nervous about this, I was happy I had made it past the culling phase with at least one school!

I also got invited to interview with Facebook at the Tapia Conference and invited to a Google workshop called Google.GetAJob(). I felt like I would have a lot of hard decisions to make in the next couple of months about our future.

February 2013: It All Starts Coming Together

The first week in February is when I attended the Tapia Conference. While I was there I spent a day visiting my friends at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I talked to them about my grad school applications and interviews. It was really great to catch up and also know that what I was going through was completely normal. The conference itself was also really great. I got to meet people from all over and network with the research labs. I did a poster presentation, which I had only done once before. I got a lot of really great feedback and most of it was positive, too.

During the conference, immediately after my Facebook interview, I got an email saying that I had been accepted to present my poster at the Student Research Competition at CHI 2013 in Paris. If I had had any thoughts of just skipping graduate school and going to industry, they instantly vanished. I knew I wanted to do well at CHI and continue doing research that I enjoyed so much.

After I came home from the Tapia Conference, I had my interview with UC Irvine. It was very informal and a really positive experience. I was able to tell them I had gotten accepted to CHI, which really helped my own confidence.

I also found out that I was invited to an interview on campus at University of Colorado, Boulder set for the 14^th of February. So, off I went on another trip after having just come back from Washington DC.

The night before I left for Boulder, I found out that I had gotten into UC Irvine. I was over the moon. It also made me feel much more comfortable while traveling to Boulder. There I met with students and faculty on the campus. I really loved the town, at least until I got snowed in and ended up staying an extra day. I’m not sure I could live in a place where there’s that much snow. It was still a great learning experience and I got a good idea of what I wanted to find out about Irvine when I visited them in March.

Google.GetAJob() 2013

February 11, 2013 / kateringland / 0 Comments

Recently, I had the great fortune of attending Google.GetAJob() at the Google office in Washington, DC during the Tapia Conference (more on that in another blog!). This is a program Google puts on for students that have a minority status in the computing field. I know they hold this events for certain universities, but since my university is so tiny, it’s great they decided to put this on for Tapia Conference attendees.

I did have to fill out a survey and be selected for this workshop. I think checking the box “have done multiple technical interviews and never had an offer” might have tipped the scale. No way to know. Doesn’t matter, I’m just happy to have had the experience.

To sum up in one word: empowering.

I feel like the Googlers there took the power of the technical interview situation and put it back in my hands. All of the sudden, these engineers weren’t these amazing, untouchable computer gods (don’t get me wrong, they are still amazing at what they do), but instead they are just people. In fact, they are women and minorities- many of them who have recently graduated and were in the same exact position I am in now (except I want to go to grad school and put off that amazing Google job for a few more years, but I digress).

Since I got all this great info on the in’s and out’s of the ominous technical interview, I thought I would pass it along to the magical internet land. So, here are some of my notes and thoughts. I realize some of them may seem obvious, but I want to have this all together in one location (for my own future reference!).

How the application process works at Google is as follows:

Apply to the job you want.
Your resume is reviewed by real human beings, not machines, and then passed along if it is found qualifying.
1^st round of interviews on the phone. There will be probably 2 of these and they will be technical. The coding is usually done in a google doc or something of that ilk.
If applying for a Full Time position, 3-5 technical interviews are then done on site. If applying for an internship, there is a host matching process to see if there is a good place for you.
A hiring committee then decides whether or not to extend the offer.

The entire process will take ~1-2 months, unless there is a specific time crunch (other offers, etc).

Obviously, this is very Google specific, but I know most of the big tech companies are going to do something at least similar. Facebook, for instance, (I know since I just did a first round of interviews with them) does a phone screen (or conference/campus screen) which is a technical interview. If they like you, they will fly you out to Menlo Park for ~3 interviews onsite.

Another important thing to point out: no matter what position you are applying for, whether it is software engineer or ux researcher, you will have to do technical interviews.

An interesting Google tidbit is they highly encourage their employees to publish their work. This doesn’t apply to all work, but if the research isn’t something they want to hold on to for a while for obvious reasons, they will encourage it to be published.

Resumes. These are what get you the first interview, so they are very important. Since this was a workshop for students, I’m going to be describing what a typical student resume should strive for.

The most important things should be top, front, center. Education (when you are graduating, gpa, name of school), what position type you are looking for (internship versus full time), and languages. For languages, list them including proficiency. The Googler reviewing my resume recommended using the phrases “Proficient in: language list” and “Familiar with: language list”. This keeps is clean and easy to figure out what exactly you know. Also, never include the word “expert” unless you wrote the language yourself because it’s just asking for trouble in your interviews.

Next on the resume should be relevant experience. I originally had projects/experience listed separately from my work experience and my reviewer recommended lumping them all together in one clean section. Sort this list by relevance, not chronology. Remember, anything closer to the top will get noticed first (and possibly be the only thing that gets noticed during the skim). So, if you did something amazing on a project, put that first. Sell yourself.

Another big thing that I heard several times was that Google was sad to see so little in terms of Open Source projects on student resumes. List any projects and especially highlight any open source work. If you have time, maybe go DO an open source project because it will a) make you a more awesome programmer and b) help you get a job. The reason open source is coveted is because employers can easily just go look at any code you have written and see your abilities. They can get a really good feel for how you program without the pressure of an interview.

Do include towards the end of the resume your other great stuff: awards, honors, publications, patents, conferences, presentations, and interests. Google wants to hire interesting people, so if you are doing something interesting in your spare time (do you actually have spare time as a cs student???) then add it.

Key Resume Ideas:

Sell Yourself
It’s okay if your resume is more than a single page, as long as your most valuable info is on the front at the top
Be interesting!

The Technical Interview. I am going to be honest. So far, I have really been terrible at these. I am the sort of person, who when their intelligence is questioned freeze up and look way dumber than one can possibly imagine. I know that this part of the getting hired process is always going to be the hardest thing for me. I have accepted that and can live with it. I just need to get good enough to get through.

Biggest take home message for the technical interview. Know your programming language of choice inside and out. Be good at it. How do you do this outside of your course work? Do your own projects! Make an app, code up a game, or do something you think is fun and interesting. It doesn’t have to ever leave your computer if you don’t want it to, but it’s important to just practice, practice, practice. Remember how I was talking about the whole open source project. Join one of those cool open source communities and start working on their code. It’s a great way to get coding and meet a whole new support group.

Data structures, algorithms, and generally being able to problem solve will also be must haves for the interview process. Big companies will expect you to know the general structure (and be able to code) things like stacks, queues, graphs, hashmaps, trees, etc.

At the end of the day this is what they are really looking at during a technical interview:

Do you know the language you picked? Can you code?
Can you analyze a problem and then algorithmically optimize that solution?
- You don’t have to be optimal at the first go, just get a solution out and then start talking optimization.
- Does the code you wrote on the board work? Would it compile?
Before saying you’re done, test your code! Be sure to keep edge cases in mind (it might be a good idea to write these down before you even start coding).

One big thing that I saw today in the mock interviews and have been guilty of myself in the past, is jumping right into coding before mapping out your idea, writing out test cases, and generally clarifying the problem. If the interviewer asks you to define a function, it’s totally okay to ask all the questions you need in order to write the most productively. Today some of the students in my group didn’t know how a stack worked, so they just froze up and freaked out. Ask questions! Is the string you are working with in ASCII or UTF-8? How is the data being stored in that tree? What kind of data are we sorting? And so on… Then draw pictures, write out ideas, outline the solution, write snippets of pseudocode. These things will help when it comes to finally coding up your solution. First, it will help you not get lost in the code. “What was this loop supposed to iterate on, again…?” And it may help when it comes to testing and optimizing too!

One final tech interview tip: listen to the hints your interviewer is giving you. They really do want you to do well! Think of the interview as more of a coding amongst friends situation (yeah, I find that advice a little hard to follow as well).

Doing mock interviews was an excellent experience for me, not because I practiced writing code up on a whiteboard or solving these problems on the fly, but because I got a chance to see just how NOT behind I am in terms of my abilities. I am in a constant state of not believing in myself when it comes to my coding abilities. I dread telling people I’m a senior because then they expect me to be able to code things. But honestly, the students I coded with today were all over the place in terms of their abilities. So maybe I can do this afterall…

That about sums up my notes from today. It was an AMAZING experience. Everything I have heard about Google’s work place seems to be fairly accurate: nice space, cool toys, and great food. Everyone there was extremely nice to me. I definitely recommend if anyone has the opportunity to attend one of these workshops in your neighborhood. If you don’t get the chance, I hope these notes will help you along the way to your own CS career.

Just remember to seek out new opportunities and seize them! Good luck on your endeavors.

Slaying the Beast

January 21, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

In terms of the internet, this was a pretty exciting week. A lot of publicity went out about SOPA and PIPA in order to get the bills quashed. Anyone with internet access Wednesday probably noticed the blackout. While Google took a more reserved approach and only censored out their name, others went on strike, taking their sites down completely for the day. It even got covered by the New York Times.

Even Finite Universe was on strike January 18th.

I thought it was a bold move and I think it got the message across to some people. SOPA has already been put off to the point where it will have to be rewritten before it can be considered again. But I think this is just the beginning for this flavor of anti-piracy tactics. And until the congressmen and senators become a more informed group of people, these types of bills will keep showing up. They either need to educate themselves about what the internet is and what it’s all about, or they need to actually listen to the experts about such matters. It’s that or we as a people need to vote for someone else. The internet is an integral part of this country’s operation now and a part of many people’s daily lives. Citizens (that means YOU) need to stay vigilant for more legislation that will be infringing on their rights.

Mutually Assured Destruction

January 7, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

Rumors have been flying around the various social media sites this week as lawmakers gear up to vote on SOPA and PIPA. The biggest rumor being that the big internet companies that have sent a letter recommending the acts not be passed are threatening to shut themselves down if lawmakers fail to listen.

So my first question was, what exactly is SOPA? The “Stop Online Piracy Act” is a 78 page bill that attempts to eliminate online piracy. It does this through a variety of ambiguous methods including saying that anyone who posts copyrighted material will be prosecuted and can spend three years in jail. The website, if it fails to take down the offending copyrighted material within five days, will be shut down. So, every time a 16 year old girl sings a cover of her favorite new pop song, she could be thrown in jail and YouTube could be shut down. But it gets better. Any offending off-shore websites can be censored. Much akin to how China and Iran censor their countries’ internet.

The companies supporting the bill are those in the music and video industries. Disney and ESA (who represents game companies including Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, and more…) are just to name a couple supporters. Basically anyone who is feeling the pain of piracy in the checkbook department.

In response to this bill, several large internet companies have banded together in opposition. Among these companies are: Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, Zynga, and LinkedIn. If on January 24^th, the bill is passed, these companies could do the unthinkable and disrupt their own services. I like to think of it as mutually assured destruction. Our country’s economy relies on the internet more than anyone would care to admit. If all the major players decided to fight back, life could get uncomfortable for a lot of people. Or maybe not having Facebook for a day will prove to people they really don’t need it after all. Who knows?

I personally think that this whole SOPA thing is a really bad idea. People should be writing to their congressmen and telling them to get their heads out of the sand! The internet is here to stay and censorship is not the answer! Perhaps it’s time for the video, game, and music companies to come into this century and let THEM change their ways of distribution. The American people are telling these companies how they would like to be able to access their entertainment through their behavior. It’s time to listen and give them what they want instead of inventing new ways to throw them in jail!

Happy Times at Grace Hopper 2011

November 26, 2011 / kateringland / 0 Comments

This year, November 9^th through 11^th, I went to my first technical convention. The Grace Hopper Celebrating Women in Computing is not your typical convention, however. It is plugged as primarily for women attendees (men were, of course, welcome but it turns out very few elected to come). It is held in a different city in the United States every fall and I was lucky enough to have it come near me this year, Portland, Oregon. Not only that, but as a student, I was selected through lottery to become a Hopper, which is a student volunteer at the convention. This meant that in exchange for a few hours of my time during the weekend I would receive a refund on my entrance fee. Not an insignificant amount of money. Even though it was in the middle of my school semester, all my professors made allowances for me to go and my computer science professor was particularly enthusiastic that all the women in his class attend.

I knew all this was going to be a huge opportunity for me to grow as a woman in technology and as a person in general. I didn’t fully realize how much of an effect it was going to have on me until I was a part of it.

I arrived at my hotel the evening before the convention opened. I had to be at the convention center before 7 am in order to get debriefed on my Hopper shifts. I wanted to get to my hotel with plenty of time to walk around and time how long it would take me to get to various places, but I ended up packing and repacking so many times that we didn’t get there until 8:30 at night. Now, bear in mind, that my house is a 30 minute drive to the hotel room. I was packing out of sheer nervousness and excitement for the weekend. Had I forgotten something (which I invariably always do) I knew I could just run home and get it, but that didn’t matter. It was the act of getting ready for the trip that made the whole thing seem more real for me. I spent so much time in the weeks preceding thinking and talking about how wonderful and fun the convention was going to be that I had really worked up into this glorious thing, the night before I was worrying my expectations were too high.

I hadn’t. I got there early the first day to go to my shift debriefing, as I mentioned. The place was very quiet, there were only a few early birds like me. I didn’t have to wait in line to pick up my goodie bag and badge. Having never been to a conference or convention like this before, I had no idea how much free loot I was going to get. The crazy amount of swag was impressive. My only comment to the companies out there would be: 4 different compact mirrors? Really? That’s what webcams are for. Someone is CLEARLY not in touch with today’s technical woman. I would have been much happier with cute flash drives.

On the plus side, Google and Microsoft both had very nice t-shirts (women’s cut ++) that I actually feel sexy in. There is something about Microsoft’s red “Geek Girl” shirt that makes me feel really good. Also, Microsoft wins again by giving out air plants at their booth instead of more plastic crap, thereby showing they have a vested interest in reducing their carbon footprint. I’d say they get the overall prize for best free stuff ever.

One of my first thoughts as I wandered the halls locating the essentials (coffee stands, food carts, escape routes, and bathrooms) was, “The lines for the bathrooms are going to be ENORMOUS. What a pain.” Well, apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had that thought because almost every single men’s room door had this taped on them:

Glorious. In his speech about how important diversity is to the future of technology and encouraging women to join the technological field could only be a good thing, President of the ACM, Alain Chesnais said that he finally understood what it was to be in the minority because he had to walk halfway across the convention center just to go to the bathroom.

Overall, there was an energy about the conference and a camaraderie that I have not really felt before. The closest I think I’ve ever come to it is at PAX (when I had the good fortune of going a few years ago.) There were about 2600 women in attendance at Grace Hopper and they were all there to help each other out and give the kind of support that is hard to get in a male dominated classroom or workplace.

I learned a lot from everyone I interacted with and a motivation to excel in my field was rooted in me that I didn’t know existed. I came home from the conference with a desire to pursue my dreams of making my own computer games and starting an ACM-W chapter at my school. I want to share this support and courage that I gained from the women at the convention with all the women in my department that didn’t have the good fortune of attending. I guess you could say I want to pass it on or pay it forward.

Most importantly, I want to keep going because I’m not just doing it for myself but all the women who will come after me, who perhaps just need a little more encouragement to get there.

Grace Hopper Celebrating Women in Computing 2012 is being held in Baltimore, Maryland next year. I’m already brainstorming ways that I am going to get there. This year’s convention was that good.