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Introduction: We continue the "My Summer @ Google" series with a post from Tasha, a rising sophomore studying computer science at New Mexico State University. Tasha (who you may remember from a previous post) was a part of this summer’s Freshmen Engineering Practicum internship program.

Every morning, I would jump out of bed, excited that I was actually an intern at Google and I could not wait to see what amazing things the Googleplex had in store for me. As I arrived on the Google campus, I would grab breakfast and head to my desk, where I was surrounded by my four fellow interns: Ashley Sarver, University of Florida; Enrique Sada, University of Texas at Austin; Erica Hansen, Carnegie Mellon; and Mario Villaplana, Stanford. The five of us made up the first class of the Freshmen Engineering Practicum internship program.

Tasha (center) with the other Freshmen Engineering Practicum interns.

Freshmen Engineering Practicum is a ten-week internship program that is designed to give rising sophomores the opportunity to experience what the atmosphere and working environment is like at Google. The participants are assigned a project to work on for the entirety of the internship, to be completed alongside an existing team of other Googlers. The program also pairs each participant with a Google engineer mentor who can provide guidance and advice, both technical and non-technical.

We worked closely with the mobile search team on iOS UI test automation for the Google Search app. Over the course of the summer, the main focus of the project was to decrease the amount of time it took to manually conduct regression tests. Our job was to not only turn each manual test case into an automated test that could perform on its own, but make it so that several automated tests would run consecutively. By the end of the summer, we had automated our goal of about half of the test cases that we were given, and with our command-line tool we could actually run the tests in mere minutes instead of hours!

At the conclusion of the program, I had gained this sense of confidence that I was ready to go back to school and rock all of my classes with all of my the new and improved skills that I learned over the previous ten weeks. First of all, working with a team taught me that good communication becomes essential to the team’s success. I believe that our team worked really well together and our success was dependent on the sharing and communication of information, ideas, or problems relating to the different aspects of our project. Furthermore, being in a team environment improved my people and teamwork skills, which I know will benefit me in the future. Additionally, I learned that products like Google Docs, Calendar, and Gmail make it very easy to collaborate with team members, and I definitely plan on utilizing those tools for group projects during the school year.

Each day of work was more exciting than the previous. One of the best parts was that my summer experience was not only full of work, but it was also full of fun! Playing ultimate frisbee with the Google ultimate interns and fun events like the intern boat cruise were only a couple of the epic activities that I got to experience. Along the way, I met so many incredible people and formed many unforgettable friendships. Freshmen Engineering Practicum made my summer phenomenal, and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store!

Posted by Tasha Nesiba, 2011 Freshmen Engineering Practicum participant