Cupcakes and More EP Interns!

Tuesday, June 19.

Today I ate lunch with Sabrina, my mentor. We drove to Cafe Crave which is located in the Google West Campus. There was a soccer game going on, so we chatted while watching the game. I don't remember which teams were playing though. lol It was a quick lunch, but it was good catching up with her.

After lunch, I had to go to the Crittenden campus because I was gonna give a short presentation to the new Freshmen Engineering Practicum (FEP) interns. I spoke to 11 freshmen about what my experience was like in FEP last summer, the project I worked on, what I learned, and some advice I had for them.

2011 FEP interns! Erica, Enrique, me, Ashley, and Mario :)

In a nut shell, I told them that from FEP I learned teamwork and communication by working with other interns, technical skills by working on a technical project, other soft skills by going to skills based training classes, and I became really efficient at using Google products! The advice I gave to them were things that I have learned from interning at Google before: 

• don't be afraid to ask questions
• it's normal to feel overwhelmed the first few weeks
• you can look up the food menus before you choose a cafe to eat
• it's a good idea to keep a document/blog/journal to have a record of what you did/learned over the summer

The presentation was only about 10 minutes long, and I could tell that the FEP interns were already tired and overwhelmed from having to go through orientation the whole morning!


After the presentation I went back to my desk and put in some more work, not too much though because we had another EP event that afternoon. Carolyn planned a cupcake social for us to meet 8 new EP interns that had to start later because their schools let out later. :)  Everyone met on main campus at 4pm, but Carolyn, who was picking up the cupcakes from Sprinkles Cupcakes, was stuck in traffic. Iris quickly came up with a way for us to pass the time and get to know each other. She made us all get into a big circle. The activity was that we were supposed to say our name and then an animal that begins with the same letter that our name does. For example, I chose Tasha Turtle. Not only did we have to say our own, we had to say the names and animals of every person that had gone before us. We foreshadowed that this was going to be really hard for the last person. IT WAS SO HOT OUTSIDE! 

Huddling in the shade...

It might have been the heat, but it seemed that the activity was taking sooo long (it's also good to keep in mind that there is 42 EP interns). When Carolyn got there, we were only half way through the circle. So to make it go faster, Iris changed the game where we only had to repeat the 5 people who had gone before us instead of everyone. This made it go faster, and we finally got to eat our cupcakes. I think we all attacked the cupcake table... haha In the end I was happy because I got red velvet. MMM!

Dear Sprinkles, you make good cupcakes :)

After we got our cupcakes, we mingled with the rest of the EP group and, of course, we took pictures. Thanks to brenda for always taking pictures! I feel like I'm always stealing the ones she took. :( I need to start getting better at taking my own... lol

Cupcakes make people happy

Well thanks to Carolyn, we had another successful EP event! After the event I chatted with Carolyn for a little bit. We talked about how cute Jess' baby was. Jess is another awesome Googler that I met during CSSI. She may never read this, but congrats to Jess anyway! :) Then like any other weekday, I went back to work, ate dinner at a yummy cafe with amazing free food, and took the shuttle home.


"Being strong means having the capability and fortitude to stand steadfastly despite the blows of change."