Day 5

It's finally Friday! I feel like i've been here for a really long time, but at the same time its hard to believe that our first week is drawing to a close. We only have one class today, then had some time to finish up our diversity posters, and then spent an hour presenting our ideas to Google interns and employees who dropped in to walk through our poster show. The presentations went well, and although some people tried to stump us with questions, I think we pretty successfully answered them. We then went to a different cafe for lunch with some of the Google interns between biking back over to Crittenden for our afternoon sessions.

Our first session of the afternoon was an industry panel. The panel included a tenured CS professor from Stanford who was also a part-time engineer at Google. We also had software engineers from some start-up tech companies in silicon valley. There was a woman who worked in marketing at Intel, a game designer from EA Games, and a software engineer/design lead from NASA. They all talked about the dynamic nature of the industry and gave us some really useful advice. The guy from NASA (whose name coincidentally was Guy) told us about the new rover bot they're building to send to Mars. So the way he's told to describe is is as follows: "a mini-cooper-sized robot with frickin' lasers." He also mentioned how cool it was to walk into mission control just to say "hi."

After a short break, we did an exercise called True Colors, a method of simplified personality typing using colors. We took a short little quiz to determine which of the four colors (blue, green, gold, orange) represented our personalities. My color was green- creative, logical, critical thinker, problem solver-- with gold-- dependable, parental-- as my secondary color. We did an exercise about educating each other about how to communicate with people of different colors also. And after we had revealed our true colors, we got on the shuttle to head back to SJSU before going on to Santana Row.

We ended up eating at the mall across the street before heading back to Santana Row to go into H&M. I did get a $10 pair of jeans.. and a scarf.. because I really need another one of those. But it is zebra print to match my shoes. We walked around outside and enjoyed the weather until it was time to get on the shuttle and come back to campus. I then lost horribly in ERS and then spent the evening with the roomies.

Sorry no picture today, its getting late! We're heading to Great America tomorrow, but we do get to sleep in!

Until then,

~Lynn