Many sophomores and juniors have very high hopes that there internship will be fun and enjoyable. But for many, like me, there internship was nothing like they imagined. Although this internship was somewhat dull, I have learned a lot about the type of careers without going insane. Working with my hands is one of my greatest skills and being confined to a chair all day can make me feel like a wound up spring ready to explode any second.
For the past two weeks I have had the pleasure of driving 15 mph in traffic to my internship. On my first day of internship I gave myself an hour to get to my job and I arrived in about 30 minutes. Then I decided to leave a little later so that I could have some more time to eat and get ready; bu this time traffic was worst then the day before. By the end of the first week, I found out that if I leave 15 minutes earlier I do not hit any traffic on my way to my internship. I also had to remind myself to get gas the night before because one morning I forgot to get gas and I almost ran out getting to the gas station. Overall, I enjoyed driving in traffic I was able to relax and listen to some music before my internship.
After about the third day, I decided that I am not the type of person that can work in an office and that I cannot be doing the same thing day after day. I need to have a very interesting career or something that is different each day to keep me absorbed in the project.
My mentor Rochelle Kline-Casey is very nice; she has helped me so much while I was creating my script for executing tests. At some times I had no idea what I was doing. The other employees were also very helpful and each day at 3, we would have a meeting with the programmers in
I had my own desk and computer that I used to test different programs. Each employee had there own room or desk and no one had to share a room with another employee. Evan though all the rooms had doors, many of the employees kept them open to welcome others in to talk or to ask questions. Evan and I were working on the same program so that when we had a question we would often come to each other for the answer.
One of the coolest things of working at Qualcomm was the free drinks and Hot Chocolate. One of the first things I do in the morning is go and get a hot chocolate. It warms me up and energizes me for the rest of the day. The Vending machines do not always have the same kind of soda in them after a few walks around the building I was able to find out where I could get Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew. The Mountain Dew was a hard soda to find; I actually found it when I was in a meeting looking in the portable fridge. The mountain Dews seem to only be in the meeting rooms the reason for this still ponders my mind. Probably over the two week period, I must have had at least one of each type of soda.
The lab was the most interesting part of the building. The lab is restricted to non-employees, so I can’t talk about what goes on inside. The only way to get into the lab is to swipe your id badge; you must have special access to go into the labs. What I can say is that there are at least 50 computers in each lab and there 22 labs in the building. These computers are used to test the brew application for the new phones coming out in the market. For the beginning of the week, we used a high speed camera to measure the speed of a competitor's applications. We would complete these tests in the lab because it was the only location with enough room for the camera.
