Computer Science Internship Story: Google

Naman Bansal

Computer Science

What company did you intern with and where are they located?

I interned at Google, Sunnyvale, California office.

How did you identify and apply for your internship? Are there any specific resources you used to find the opportunity (i.e. Handshake, career fairs, other recruitment events)?

It was a fairly standard process on my end. I requested my friend for a referral and directly via their job portal.

What was the application process like?

I was happily surprised to know that there was no DSA round. They just called me for an hour long technical interview. After a few days, I got to know that I would be moving to team matching round wherein I had to fill lengthy questionnaire about my research and the kind of teams/products I would like to work on during the internship. After this, I had to wait for almost 3 months to hear back from any team. I had almost given up hope at some. Fortunately, a couple of teams approached me and interviewed me and just before the start of summer, I got my acceptance letter. 

Tell us about your internship experience. What types of tasks and projects did you engage in? Was there a particular project or part of the experience you learned the most from?

It was a fun and challenging experience. It was an exploratory research project where we worked on personalized recommendation using LLMs. However, the toughest part was that it was new to both me and even my team both from the conceptual and infrastructure perspective. So, initially, I worked on coming up with various research proposals and ideas and it took us almost ~6 weeks to finalize the idea and design document. The last seven weeks were a grueling experience since I had to implement the model, run experiments and analyze and compile results. There were a multiple blockers at each step of the way and we were even considering extending out internship at one point. But, at the end, I managed to successfully finish everything on time without any extension. Just to give an idea, I ran ~200 experiments and provided interesting insights. 

In what ways did this internship help you prepare for your next destination after Auburn?

Drawing from my past internship at Meta, I was confident in my abilities to succeed in this field. However, the unique time frame of this experience presented fresh challenges. Despite being new to the recommendation domain, my research background at Auburn enabled me to swiftly grasp its concepts and contribute innovative ideas.

In what ways did your coursework or other experiences at Auburn prepare you for your internships? Are there specific topics or skills you learned from classes that you put into practice on the job?

I cannot pin-point to any specific skills or topics, but my overall training at Auburn definitely helped me during my internship.

Do you have any advice for other students looking for internships like yours?

I feel all students should at least do an internship during their study. This will give you an idea about the industry and accordingly, you can prepare yourselves for the future requirements.