I Am Bismark

ok, so i am back in the swing of school now. i bet a lot of you are wondering what the butt happened to me for the past few weeks. its been pretty wild and crazy, so i will try to fill in the details over a few posts.

at work, i got a couple of new projects. i started working with the software engineers to see what doing some software dev was like. i was helping implement hardware texture and lighting in the windows xp driver. i will be honest, i don’t think i contributed much. i found out a lot about direct 3d and general 3d graphics processing. i also learned a bit about driver dev and testing. i did check in some code into the driver repo… who knows if it will ever make it out to customers or not. but it was a good experience nevertheless. given a few months of that, i think i could really enjoy it.

i also was working on writing some documentation and then helping out with the usual testing, debugging, etc. i stayed busy.

the last week was all pretty whirlwind it seemed. we had a few last lunches with the team and with the interns. i did a lot of talking with huy about grad school, working, etc. i still have a ton to think about.

i gave my exit presentation on the friday before i left, which honestly made it a bit tough to go one for another week. but i think it was a good recap, just to look at everything i had done. here are a few highlights:

i quoted some of my blogs, in particular this and this. the question i asked at the beginning of my presentation was whether i achieved those goals or not.

i said that while there were of course some things i disliked, i thing i learned from everything. i did a ton of really cool projects. things like:

• encoded hd videos for an atom demo at a conference.
• researched and gave a training on google’s android.
• became a content expert on the CUI SDK. i wrote a sample app for switching displays, helped a customer write an app for blanking displays, and debugged a bunch of other CUI SDK apps.
• modified the intel installer framework to install our media codecs
• helped give a moblin training
• setup a method for distributing linux codecs through shell archives
• did a ton of testing and benchmarking
• helped with japanese translation on customer machines
• etc

my point was that i definitely learned a ton and experienced a ton during those 8 months.

and the perks were great too. a bunch of free dinners with customers at some nice places (i never did blog about the $950 dinner, did i?), free drinks, and in the last week they started giving out free fruit which i made sure to take advantage of. i’ve talked about kudos quite a bit, and i am embarrassed to say how many i have gotten.. i wonder if i need to declare those on my taxes?

i pointed out what i thought were my weaknesses too. i still do too much waiting around for people telling me what to do (this is the part of me that is still an undergraduate student). and when i am having trouble, i needed to be better at going out to find the answer, even if it means talking to someone i don’t really know very well. i think these are things i will improve on with time.

my exit interview was on thursday afternoon. i had it with the manager two levels above me, so it was a bit daunting, but he gave me lots of praise in addition to the review my manager had written for me. i was ranked as an outstanding intern, which i felt pretty happy about. i think thats definitely something that will help me in my future job search.

after that, i finished cleaning out my desk (i brought home a bag of various pieces of swag), wiped my laptop, turned in my id badge, and was walked out of the building. the end of my 8 months as an intel employee.

this was a good experience for me. i am really really grateful i had it, and i know its definitely going to help me later on in life.