Darn, it’s been about 3 weeks since I have updated this blog. Sorry 
2 weekends ago, I was at Redmond, Washington for my Microsoft interview. So, I flew down to Seattle on Saturday and checked into Marriott Redmond (near Redmond Town Center). Marriott was beautiful and had absolutely excellent service. I checked out Bellevue Town Square and had some cheesecake there! It was really awesome too! The Windows store and Mac store were completely packed. It was ridiculous. It was so picked to the point that I couldn’t even walk in and check out their products. There were so many people that it was even worst than Boxing Day shopping but there were no special sales on! The following day, Sunday, I spent most of my time doing homework and having some last minute prep for the interview. I was very nervous that night and I couldn’t really sleep. I probably had about 4 hours of sleep before the interview. Very bad idea!
The next morning, the big day, I woke up at about 6:30am and I was too excited and nervous to go back to sleep. At about 7:30am, I got a knock to the door and room service for breakfast was here! I only got a hot chocolate and bagel with cream cheese. That was around 8 or 9 dollars, very expensive! After a small mix up with some taxi problem, I headed to Building 111. I signed in at their reception place and headed over to the Microsoft Experience Lounge. Holy smokes, there were a lot of (mostly) college candidates there! There were food, computers, TV, video games for us to play before our interview. It was weird to see candidates playing violent shooting games before an interview though. I got to talk to a couple of them before my recruiter came and talked to me. Turns out, I was interviewing for the Internet Explorer team for the SDET position at Building 50. I didn’t do too well for my first interview and maybe that basically put me as a no-hire. I thought the coding questions for all 3 of my interviews were really easy. My day ended at around 2pm and I pretty much knew I wasn’t going to get hired. Afterwards, I went back to Building 111 and waited to talk to my recruiter again. Afterwards, I stayed around for 2 hours to talk to other college candidates and what/how their interview was about and where did they go to school etc… It was really fun to meet all these people! I met two guys, one from Duke and another from UofMichigan Ann Arbor and went to dinner with them.
Here’s a picture of us 3 at dinner. Anirudh (guy on left) got hired! Congrats to him! Sam (middle guy) will be off to Cisco in sunny California while I’ll be staying in Vancouver for PDFTron! It’ll be a fun and rewarding summer. Too bad that we won’t be working at the same company!
For UCOSP, I’m working ReviewBoard and so I flew out to Edmonton on the Thursday with another UBC student, Kenneth. We stayed at Holiday Inn Express in downtown Edmonton. It was a pretty nice place and excellent that we got our own beds! Unfortunately, I fell extremely ill on Thursday but I decided to go on the trip to Edmonton. Upon getting to Edmonton, I wasn’t getting any better and got much worse on Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, I was too weak and feeling too sick and so I decided to drag myself to the UofA Hospital. It wasn’t too bad. I was there for 4.5 hours and had 2 IVs and I felt much better. Doctor felt that everything was going to be okay and I got discharged. For shutting down my phone for 4.5 hours, upon turning it on, I got extreme number of emails and text to deal with. I’m way too busy! For the rest of the sprint, I spent the time either working on the project with my teammates or I’m in bed sleeping. I didn’t do too much. Luckily, I’ve been to Edmonton before so I didn’t miss out too much. I figured out what to do for my project, adding a Quick Search functionality. After all this, I flew back home on Sunday and got home by 6pm.
I forgot to mention, I did have a co-op interview with PDFTron (downtown Vancouver) on the Wednesday, right before I got super sick. The interview was about 1.25 hrs and went pretty smoothly. I think I’ll actually really like what this position will offer. It seems to be lots on C++, C# and getting a role in software development. I’m very excited to finally have a chance to actually work on some project and be able to contribute to them. This will be a very good challenge for me and I’m excited! So, this will be my 3rd and 4th work term and I’ll only have 1 more after this.
Yesterday (Saturday), I was in Bellingham at Western Washington University for an Ultimate frisbee tourney playing for the UBC Women’s team. Unfortunately, since I’ve been so sick, I couldn’t really play. I was too weak to play so I only managed to play in 1 game. I think I played about 6 points. My team went 3-1 but I think we have lots more potential to be better. I think the deal is that the team needs to continue to work hard at practice and keep up our intensity and focus at all times. I’m excited for upcoming tournaments! On another note, I’ve been voted by my peers as 1 of the 2 team captains for the team. This will be another good challenge for me.
That’s it from for today. I’ll also be doing some blog postings onhttp://reviewboardstudents.wordpress.com/ Take a look when you have a chance!
