I'm so lucky to be surrounded by people who see working at companies like Google and Facebook as commonplace. But I was recently talking to a friend about breaking into the world of tech, and was reminded of how daunting it seemed from the outside. I barely knew how to code in 2014, attended an unknown college (this is pre-Waterloo), and knew very few software engineers. By the end of the year, I had secured internships at Google and Facebook. This was my journey as I remember it.
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Jan 2014: My journey begins. I'm 18, a freshman, and ask a bunch of strangers from my college to drive to Detroit with me in the middle of winter to attend MHacks III. There, in a sleep-deprived stupor on night two, I meet the team that was in the process of starting Hack the North at Waterloo. One of them tells me I need to transfer to Waterloo. Another offers me a juice box.
I fall in love with the energy at hackathons. The students and sponsors alike, simultaneously starry-eyed with the possibility of tech and ruthless at execution. I struggle with setting up Git. I watch incredible demos at the end of the weekend: an iOS automation tool that would eventually get acquired by Apple, a nerf gun intrusion detection system.
May 2014: I convince my favourite professor to give me a research position building a web app -- a collaborative whiteboard -- for him. He puts me on a team of three. The other two are some of the nicest guys I have ever met. No hubris, and I ask all my stupid questions all summer. One of them — my friend Stephen — teaches me how to write real, running code that summer.
Every waking hour I'm not reading, running, or working, I attempt to teach myself algorithms. I pore over this tome called Introduction to Algorithms, which I don't understand a word of, but make a valiant effort to. (It wasn't until two years later that I would begin to make sense of it.) I go through pages of Cracking the Coding Interview, disobeying all of Gayle's advice and skipping straight to the answers.
June 2014: I'm sitting in my room chewing on the back of a Muji pen with a thousand tabs open. I had just learned about the Grace Hopper conference and I knew, knew, knew that I had to go. Only question: how? My school didn't have funding to sponsor students — I had already asked. I decide to give all of the student scholarships a shot: GHC's internal one, Facebook's, Google's.
Cracking the Coding Interview continues. I am obsessed with securing an internship for a top-tier company in the Bay Area for the following summer. Part of this is driven by a need to prove myself worthy, but part of me is genuinely excited and intrigued by the whole Silicon Valley Dream.
July 2014: I find this opportunity via Alexis Ohanian's Twitter called Code Camp. It was hosted by some company called Square, but more importantly, it was in San Francisco. Twenty college-aged women from across North America hosted for a week by Square. I apply immediately. To my surprise, they interview me. My interviewer is an ex-Google intern from MIT. I'm intimidated during the call and present myself as humble and curious.
Later that week, she calls me. "You're going to Square Code Camp!" I'm stunned. I look over the list of the nineteen other students going. Googlers and Harvard students abound. I'm intimidated and grateful to be included.
Facebook rejects me from their Grace Hopper scholarship. GHC itself rejects me. Now all my hopes are riding on Google, which was my preference to begin with, but I knew it was a long shot.
August 2014: First solo trip to San Francisco for Code Camp. I fall in love with the city over the week. Meet nineteen other women in tech who are ambitious, curious, interesting, energetic. My roommate Bethany and I hack on a project for the hackathon. We surprisingly win -- matching red iPod shuffles.
Google emails me. "Congratulations, we'd love to send you to Grace Hopper..." I jump up from my seat and dance. Call my then-boyfriend. I knew great things were in store for me at Grace Hopper. I couldn't tell you what.
September 2014: Receive an email invitation to interview with Google at GHC. Scream a little inside. I'd applied to the Engineering Practicum program -- a junior internship for less experienced, minority applicants. My recruiter emails me. "I'm putting your application forward for the regular Software Engineering internship instead. You're qualified." I scream some more inside. What?! I'm just this sophomore from a no-name school in Canada. How can I compete with juniors at Stanford and MIT for a full-blown SWE internship? I make her promise that I'll be considered for EP if I fail at the SWE interviews.
October 2014: I arrive at Grace Hopper in Phoenix, Arizona, knowing approximately 0 people at the entire event. My friend from Code Camp is due to show up later that day. My shower doesn't work. Emboldened, I knock on the door of adjacent hotel room, guessing that it was another GHC attendee. Score. Ask to use her shower, she looks at my 5'4 frame and wide-eyed undergrad enthusiasm and acquiesces. We strike up a conversation about her life — she was a prof at a school in Indiana that had brought a small contingent. How cool!
Interview with Google the next day. Stomach churning, I remind myself that this is my first real technical interview and that it's okay if I failed. First interviewer is also an Asian woman; this puts me at ease. She's soft spoken and encouraging and I solve her problem with ease. Second interviewer throws me a permutations problem. My Achilles heel! I make good progress but don't finish it. He compliments me -- apparently I had done much better than the other applicants that day. Punch the air as I leave the interview booths. I had a really good feeling about this.
November 2014: Two grueling weeks pass. I asked an older acquaintance, the only person from my college who had ever worked at Facebook, to send in my resume. "We're only hiring interns for Seattle," my recruiter informs me. No problem, I say. I would work for Facebook in Timbuktu if that's what it took. Interview with Facebook for their summer internship. The question was surprisingly easy and I solve it. Schedule the next round for December.
Google recruiter gets back to me. "We'd love to extend an offer for a Software Engineering Internship this summer! I knew you could do it!" I almost cry but sit in amazement instead. Was this real life? Now I finally had external validation that I had real potential as a software engineer.
December 2014: Second and last round interview with Facebook. The interviewer asks me a fairly basic question I've known for months. I answer with ease, we spend the rest of the interview chatting about his work at Facebook. "See you next summer," he adds cheekily at the end of the call. Recruiter gets back to me at the end of the day. "Let's get on a call. It's good news ;)"
What?! Somehow I'd passed both Google and Facebook's interviews. I only had one summer though. I quickly decide to take a leave of absence for Fall 2015. Since I had already signed the Google offer, I ask my Facebook recruiter if we could push my internship to Fall 2015. My first negotiation, and I didn't even realize I was doing it. She gets back to me: "Yeah, not a problem. Also, we only have Menlo Park roles for the fall." Score. I would much rather be in the Bay Area anyway.
Four months later, I was off to the races to start my internship at Google. Four months after that, I moved a little ways up El Camino Real and worked at Facebook. Those experiences are tales for another time. But suffice to say — this was the first time I realized that the fun in life was in the journey to achieving a goal, not in living out the attainment of the goal itself.
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