Surfin’ USA

Busy days

Time is flying and all of a sudden my first month back in Germany is almost over already. But no wonder, I’m quite busy with a lot of things:
For one there’s my internship, where I work 40 hours a week (excl. lunch breaks and commuting to work). Hence I’m out of my place most of the day. The project I work on is pretty cool, though, I’m looking into extending the algorithmic core of one of the company’s optimization systems — also fits my Master’s thesis pretty well.
In the few hours that remain I’m also trying to finish off my Master’s thesis, at the moment only the introduction remains. Apart from that I’m trying to catch up with a lot of old friends, both from Aachen and my hometown Rheinberg. All in all, as you can see, I’m quite busy.

On another note I’m missing Sweden — a lot! It’s not that I’m not having a good time here in Germany, but I really spent great one and a half years up north and met a lot of fabulous people - a shout out to all of you!
Well, I guess all good things come to an end sooner or later, there’s nothing I can do about it…

Anyway, for now I’m facing one more week of work, after which I’ll be leaving for a nice little vacation in the vicinity of Malaga, Spain!

Zurich, there and back again (once more)

I think I’ve mentioned earlier that I was in the process of interviewing with Google for a software engineering position at their rather young Zurich office. Well, after a couple of phone interviews they eventually invited me to Zurich for an on-site interview (or rather six of them, to be exact).

Last Sunday around noon I thus got on a plane to Zurich where I then had the afternoon off to explore the city, with really nice and sunny weather. Fortunately I had more time on my hand than last time and thus I strolled along the lakefront of the famous “Zürisee”, explored the old city center extensively and went for a nice dinner. My hotel, also located in the center, was very nice as well (four stars). By the way, did i mention that Google covered (almost) all expenses?

Anyway, on Monday I was then scheduled for six interviews with some of the local Google engineers, each lasting 45-50 minutes. I am not allowed to give any details about the content, but I can say that the interviews were quite tough, very technical and e.g. involved writing code on a whiteboard. What I can also tell is that apart from the actual work (which is very interesting in itself) Google seems to be a nice place to be employed: Free breakfast and lunch, free soft drinks and snacks all day long, foosball and pool tables and a lot of cool people.

I didn’t receive any direct feedback that day, however, after I had returned to Aachen they called me and told me that they won’t offer me a job, at least at this point: They said I had left a good impression and performed remarkably during the interviews, yet they felt that I’d need more hands-on experience before starting a job with Google. Hence they said they’d be happy if I’d reapply in the future, after gaining more experience in software development…

This rejection is of course a disappointment for me, but fortunately I still have some other options (which I’ll write about some other time, though). But in any case it was a good experience, the interviews were interesting and fun — and of course a free trip to Zurich is always welcome as well.

A lot to catch up on (pictures galore!)

It’s been while and a lot has happened since my last entry. I was very busy with several things, so I haven’t gotten to actually writing something here before. So let’s get started:

First of all there was my thesis and especially the conference submission I was working on. The deadline for that was the 23rd of April, hence the week before that was quite bad… Anyway, eventually I managed (with the help of my supervisor Devdatt and the former PhD student Mattias) to finish and submit a nice paper — at least we think it’s nice

That same weekend, after submitting the paper, my two good German friends Lars (”Uschi”) and Simon came for a visit (after not managing to do so for 1 1/2 years ). Anyway, together with my friends from Gothenburg we had a great time with lots of partying, but see for yourself:

The following week I spent taking care of formalities and saying goodbye to all my friends in Gothenburg, which again involved a lot of partying. Here are some more pictures:

Then, on Friday, my father drove his empty car all the way up to Sweden (roughly 1,000 km), we spent Saturday packing and drove back down on Sunday, with an overfull car. Quite surprisingly everything I wanted to take back to Germany fitted in the car.

I spent Monday home at my parents’ before going back to Aachen on Tuesday, where I’m now living in the same dorm I lived in almost two years ago. Tomorrow (Thursday) I will start an internship / summer job with a local company. I will try to write more about that in a couple of days. I will also post some reflections on my time in Sweden, so stay tuned…