Molina Dhembla - Google STEP Intern

Hey! I’m Molina Dhembla, a 3rd year UG in Computer Science Department. In summer 2022, I worked at Google India as a STEP intern (Student Training in Engineering Program) and in this blog I’ll be describing my experince from applying for the intern to working on my assigned project.

Applying

For 2022 internships, Google came via PT cell fairly early (around 21st November) and the entire process had been completed by mid-December. This was just after the 3rd semester endsems and at the time where personally, my laziness was at an all time high XD. IAFs had started rolling in from early winter and I was quite sure I wanted a company intern over research work after hearing seniors’ perspectives and Google was one of the first few companies to open the IAF.

Incidentally, my DAMP mentor had also interned at Google and from her description, it seemed like a very good fit for me with interesting and coding heavy projects where I would potentially get to use and learn new softwares, and also considering the scale of Google as a leading company, I wanted the exposure it would give. So ofcourse, I immediately signed the IAF but I was laid back in my preparations (this was the first proper vacation our batch was having after all!).

It was after 2 weeks that the shortlist came and Google held a session where they told us what we could expect in the interviews, and the format - this was when I finally buckled-up. I had gone home for the winter vacations and I somehow managed to stay awake long enough in Chandigarh winters (oof) to try out some basic CP questions and revise standard data structures and algorithms (this was only for a couple of days max though :p). 5-6 days after this meet we had our interviews - 2 rounds of technical interview - both on the same day (more on this later), and around a week later the final selections were up on the blog :).

Since Google came early, this time period overall was less hectic with hardly any other IAFs opening up at the same time unlike the 4th semester where there were multiple IAFs coming in the same week.

Interview Process

The interviews were exactly like previous year interns had mentioned - two technical rounds 45-minute long each. I gave the interviews at home, on a Google meet and the weird part was that they will make you write code on a shared Google doc! (so God help you with indentations and autocorrect spamming you with red underlines on variable names XO). They stick to the clock, 45 minutes means 45 minutes and they will tell you to wind up incase it is exceeding the limit.

I knew what to expect overall - thanks to the session and seniors. They hardly spend time on introductions and directly proceed to a DSA based question, expecting one to write proper code (its fine if you don’t know a particular syntax, you can tell them and they will ask you to use a reasonable substitute). I remember not knowing the syntax for pais in C++ and my interviewer was cool with it, asking me to use maps or tuples instead.

They were more prompt than expected when it came to shortlists for round 2! I received a call just a couple of hours later (which I first missed because I was in the washroom XD) and was scheduled for a round 2 interview due to start in 45 minutes which proceeded more or less the same as round one. Standard DSA CP-like question and Google doc coding (sigh).

Nobody asked for tips, but well

Sorry to those who attended the CSE internship session! I’ll be repeating some of the tips here - talk with the interviewer - speak out half-formed ideas as well, don’t leave too long a silence since they would like to see how you approach the problem and thinking out loud shows your thought process honestly. Using proper variable names and methodically writing code helps and you can narrate along why you are writing certain portions. If in the middle of writing one solution you get the idea for a more optimized approach, definitely mention that and proceed as per the interviewer - whether to complete current approach or write the new one from scratch. They might leave certain details of the question ambiguous on purpose so don’t be afraid to ask for clarifications - they expect you to think about corner cases and ask questions!
Just stay calm and all will be well :))

Offline Online Intern :):

The wait for results was an expectedly anxious period and around a week later when I saw ‘congrats’ pop up on my whatsapp notification from a friend I knew it could only be for one thing XD. I was extremely excited and looking forward to working in an office, meeting new people and the whole ‘adulting’ thing. Sadly 1 month before the internship was due to start, we were informed of the change in logistics from an offline intern to a work from home mode. There go the hopes of exploring a new city’s street food :(

Apart from this, in the period between confirmation and start of the internship, Google was fairly regular in contact. They sent a very detailed questionnaire to determine my interests, the fields I have done projects in before, my experience with different programming languages etc to map interns with available projects and they actually did take my responses in consideration since I had specifically written I want to explore how the backend of online transactions works and I was put in the team of Google Pay!

They also sent a portal for us to enter our tshirt sizes so we knew goodies (known as Google SWAGS XD) were on the way! In all, they kept the excitement going and us looking forward to the intern.

The Internship

Finally onto the actual internship experience! The tenure of my intern was 10 weeks, and again, Google was flexible in this - we could work for 8, 10 or 12 weeks according to our respective college timetables and I was allotted a team in Google Pay.

As expected, Google has numerous divisions for their many products and so the projects allotted across STEP interns were extremely varied, some of the teams my friends worked in were Google Photos, Search, Disaster Recovery, Google Assistant etc. The wide scope of their services and possible opportunities was one of their biggest selling point for me but getting an inside look was fascinating.

I got a lot of exposure - directly interacted with members from customer support, product management and risk analysis teams - even those based outside India. They had divided all STEP interns into small groups with fun TGIF (Thank God it’s Friday XD) meets each week where we played games and talked (read gossiped). The work culture was extremely open and everybody (no matter how senior) was very helpful which was pleasantly surprising and refreshing :). We were also allowed to sit in the monthly all-team meets where mostly the team-leaders discussed quarter goals etc but just being able to see how these function was really cool!

A bit of technical details regarding my project for those interested - I worked on developing a real time storage service to track the progress of a UPI instrument registration (basically when a GPay user attempts to add a new bank account enabled for UPI transactions). Initially, seeing the obviously vast existing codebase of Google was intimidating but they gave very well designed tutorials for us to get accustomed with the tools they use for version control, reviewing, their IDE etc. It was honestly amazing to see how they keep so many units working in coordination and their own systems put in place for the entire development to production pipeline working efficiently without crashing.

All interns worked in teams of two and overall the entire project was very well planned with the expectations being clear for us and managers being accessible for any doubts we had. One thing anyone looking to go for a company intern should be prepared for is to be able to go through and maintain extentensive documentation. One needs to read through existing documentation to understand some piece of code already there and prepare an exhaustive write-up explaining your additions. This was new for me but I enjoyed the process and the thoroughness was nice.

Social interaction wise also I had a great experience, there were interns from a lot of colleges and we had many fun meets and an online escape room game organized by them! It was a really amazing experience overall, I learnt new things, interacted with many people and enjoyed my time at Google, albeit online. Definitely recommend XD.

Phew this has become much longer than I had expected when I started writing and if you have managed to read till here, thanks a lot XD and hope this helps :)