Mike Oren.com

As many of you know, I had my second phone interview with Google on Wednesday for the user experience research internship. I think it went well, but you never know for sure until you hear back from them. This was the final interview though--they don't fly intern candidates out for on site interviews so I'll be finding out within two weeks if I have the internship or not. The interview style was significantly different than the first interview--it was more role playing what I would have done if I had been a member of the user experience research team at key points in the development of popular Google products. I had been feeling kind of out of it during the day leading up to the interview (I had a lot of built up tension that was effecting me adversely) but luckily I think I was able to shake most of that in the minutes leading up to the interview, which is good because the interview required a decent amount of thinking on my feet that I don't think would have worked so well for me based on how I was feeling earlier in the day. I enjoyed the interview though, even though there was some thinking on my feet, I still felt it was a more relaxed interview than some other ones I've had in the past, which I feel really helps me be myself and not just somebody spewing rehearsed answers for an interview (although I'll admit I do have a prepared answer for why I want to work at Google, but without that I feel like I could ramble on for the entire 45 minute interview with my reasons for wanting to work there).

In other news, I was contacted by the hiring manger of IBM's Rational Software division (the people who created the UML specifications) out in Raleigh, North Carolina regarding a summer internship with them in a user experience position. Since Google is still up in the air, and IBM is also a great company to do user experience work for, I've scheduled my interview with him for Tuesday morning. So that's always good that I potentially have another internship option if Google doesn't work out (of course, I could also just stay on campus for the summer and do my research, but I'd like some more industry experience).

This week is/was (it's almost over) spring break. My original intention was to spend my time creating the two conference posters I need to do plus finish building the spatial sound system for the C6 demo that I foolishly volunteered to help with. I've found, however, that I've struggled far more with the poster than I had anticipated--you have all this space with lots of things to say but you can't say all of it because that's not the purpose of the poster. It's really quite frustrating. It also doesn't help that my poster topic ( my audio game) doesn't lend itself very well to a visual poster. I've gotten some feedback now though, and I think I've got a good plan for revisions. I'm also hoping to get the first prototype of Wiicussion built this weekend (just basic motion mapping to pitch). We'll see how all of that goes. At the start of break though, I went home and had a great seafood buffet to celebrate my younger brother's birthday then went to Melting Pot on Saturday for my birthday (they appear to use broth instead of oil for their fondue, so I found it to be very interesting and quite enjoyable overall). Sunday evening and most of Monday I spent with my girlfriend, whom I hadn't seen in about two months--I had to go about four hours out of my way to see her, but it was an enjoyable trip. Tuesday I returned to campus, and I've spent my time since then rearranging/cleaning my room (I bought a new 32" Westinghouse LCD TV that I'm also using as a computer monitor--since I record TV shows on my desktop--so I had to change my setup to get that to work) in addition to working on the posters and preparing for my interview.

So that's all the news there is for now. Hopefully I'll have some good news in the near future regarding internships. I'll keep everybody posted.

posted by Mike Oren  # 12:13 PM