DAY 1 It was now 3pm. I haven’t got the call from IT. On schedule it said that I should receive a call from an IT before 3pm. I woke up at 9am, and did nothing at all, and now it was 3pm. The first thing on work was to connect to VPN, check my Qualcomm email. To do so the only way is of course through my Qualcomm laptop, which was shipped to me days ago with my account installed. However, not until the first day will I be able to retrieve the password, and the key man is the IT who was supposed to call me before 3pm. Without him, I can do nothing but loafing around. At 3 pm I called the IT service desk, following the steps written on the IT manual. A voice appeared and said, “please speak or enter your employee ID number.” I spoke it out, and the same number sequence was repeated by a female voice. “If the number is correct, say YES or press 1; if the number is incorrect, say NO or press 2.” So I said YES. “Please speak or enter your employee ID number,” the same voice repeated. Well… that was awkward, but maybe something went wrong at the first time. This time I tried to enter my ID from the number pad. Again, the same and correct number sequence was repeated. And I pressed 1 this time. “Please speak or enter your employee ID number.” Fuck. What is going on now? Desperately, I hung up the phone and sent an email to my HR for help. “They may be running behind.” I only got this short message reply. Nothing helpful. So I gave up. At 4pm the schedule was the orientation session. I had no choice but to use my personal laptop to attend. 2 hours of company introduction, campus team members self-introduction, IT concepts, miscellanies, and former interns Q&A. The orientation went very smoothly and, surprisingly, not boring at all. Now I knew the new activity that replaces the traditional one of surfing is ONLINE YOGA! How exciting!!! So the orientation was over. And shortly after it I finally had a call from CA. I picked up the phone with an excitement of that I finally can access to my new laptop. It turned out that it is not from the IT team, but from my team, aka 5G modem system team. My mentor in the future asked me if everything was going well because he hadn’t got my email reply from the one he sent earlier this morning. I told him the story, and he just said that okay then you really need to get through the IT process, and, we will have a meeting tomorrow. I said I will try my best, and he said good luck. Conversation ended. Hopelessly, I dialed the same number again, then entered the same ID again. “If the number is correct, say YES or press 1; if the number is incorrect, say NO or press 2.” Idiot system, but this time I will just try some random solution. So I pressed 2. A man picked up and said, “hello sir, what can I help you?” It was now 7:30 pm, I finally had my laptop set up. -- DAY 2 I finally met my mentor, video call of course. In Qualcomm we use Microsoft Teams. It is not surprising that we are anti-Apple. They give interns Lenovo laptop, which I already have one from my lab. We use outlook for email, Teams for messenger and calls, OneDrive for backup, powerpoint for presentation and word for documents. “Wo Ji J Gan Ni Suo Chong Wen How Ma? (Can I simply speak Mandarin to you?)” That was the first sentence my mentor Tony said. Then, the whole meeting remained was in Chinese. According to my secret investigation, my mentor is a Taiwanese. He graduated from NCTU, and has work in Qualcomm for 10 years. There was also another person in the call: a Chinese woman, Jing, seems to be very shy. These two are the main persons I will be work with in the next three months. We chatted about one hour. Tony briefly introduced the scope of the whole project and what I will need to do. He also walked me through some must-do. I found that in such a big company as Qualcomm, to access any file we always need to get certain authorization. I will have to acquire the access to several lists (like becoming a member of a working group in the system). The process was troublesome and took time. At this moment, I can do very few thing because I nearly have any access. Tony finally found an old ppt that does not need the access. So my first task was to go through the slides and tried to understand the ongoing project in detail. Lots of unknown keywords, but seems not to be too difficult, at least for now. At 7pm eastern time zone, we had an all-hands meeting. All-hands meeting is a meeting holding every 3 months that everyone in the whole big group should attend. Seems like our team has about 100 people. The meeting started with some introduction and welcome of new employees, including interns. Since it was only my second day on board, the host didn’t know that and my name was not on the slide. However, my mentor just interrupted and said we have our forth intern now. Embarrassingly, I did a brief self-intro. The meeting then continued with congrats on some employees’ anniversaries. That was the time I found out Tony just reached his tenth. The remaining part was about a person sharing an ongoing project. I guess they take turns sharing their working projects just as some group meeting. This ended my second day. -- DAY 3 Time lag is a problem. Michigan is three hours earlier than California, so everything starts here at noon. Today, I started my day earlier than the day started in the west coast, and when they finally started, I was ready for the online yoga. Yes. YOGA. The most exciting activity for the interns to attend during this hot summer. Not the surfing, but the online yoga. Inhale. So I got denied for all the requests I made yesterday for joining the lists. The system sucks and It is so annoying to figure out who or where I should go to. Exhale. I quickly went through the slides my mentor gave me yesterday, but I could only have good understanding on the first half. In today’s meeting my mentor and I looked into it together with I throwing questions and he answered. Hope that I didn’t screw up because obviously I should read faster. But anyway this was just the temporary slides and the real thing will be in those documents that I don’t have access to. Inhale. Oh now I finally got an access to a sharepoint list. And now I can open the document for my project. And I opened it. It is 103 pages long. Exhale. Online yoga was fucking boring. -- DAY 4 I decided to work from 10am to 8pm, and take 2 hours rest at lunch and dinner time. In this way, I will have 8 working hours per day, maximizing the overlap between two time zones without waking up early or working till very late. My mentor and I have a sync up meeting everyday at my 2pm for the first two weeks. It is actually hard to have something to talk everyday, no matter it is research or work. Yesterday not until very late did I finally get the access to those documents for the project, so I only started to ready them today. The document was a word file, which made it uncomfortable to read compared to a good pdf file paper. Moreover, I can only use the company laptop for these confidential content, so I cannot use my iPad Pro to read and mark sentences like I usually do when I read paper. I tried to imagine what will it be like to work on site in a real office. Seems like it will be very different from what I do when working on campus doing my research. I finished 25 pages before the meeting. We talked about one hour. One difference between working solely in academy and working as a member in a big company in industry is that there are so many abbreviations to deal with. Everyone seems to be very used to use as many acronyms as possible. The acronyms can come from standards, ongoing projects or other legacy. I think maybe the number of acronyms a person knows can measure the experience he/she has. If this is true, I am now a very rookie to them. But compare to the time when I just got my master degree, I can tell that I still have noticeable progress by this measurement. Yes, the reading and meeting experience in 3 PhD years helps. The final thing I finished today is MATLAB installation. Technically speaking, it was not done until the next day, because this simple installation took extremely long time. Only for verifying the license key I entered, it took 2 hours just kept rotating that small loading icon. And for actual installation, it took more than whatever hours, while the normal should be less than one hour. VPN sucks. -- DAY 5 classdef Workday < Internship properties working_hour working_content working_project end methods function obj = Workday(hour, content, project) obj.working_hour = hour; obj.working_content = content; obj.working_project = project; end function p = read_code() % look into the MATLAB simulation code for the project end function q = sync_up_meeting() % report my progress and discuss the problems I encountered end function r = weekly_meeting() % weekly meeting with the manager end end end >> day5 = Workday([10:20], ’MATLAB’, ‘MPE’); >> day5.read_code() >> I read codes for the whole morning. I first ran it for once. I thought it would take some time, but it ended within 5 seconds. Well… this might not be a good sign because then in the future I can not use the excuse “it took too long to run the simulation so I haven’t got the results yet.” The codes are well structured, but are quite complicated. I learned. The codes in a company sometimes may have more focus on the structure rather than the signal processing itself. I guess the coding skill is as important as the knowledge of DSP. (Take this acronym! How does it feel?) >> >> day5.sync_up_meeting() >> We again had a sync up meeting. The content was me asking the question about the algorithms in the document, and Jing explaining the codes for me. I now had a much clearer view of the project, about what I need to understand and what I will do. Anyway I finally can start working seriously since now I have almost all the access I need, the real codes to run, and an unclear goal to achieve. The next step will be to find (/define) a clear goal to work on. >> >> day5.weekly_meeting() >> Every week we will have one meeting with the (/my) manager on this project. This was the first time I attended it. I started with a quick self introduction, and they congratulated on my joining. Then the real meeting started. My manager is an Indian. He talks very quick, as every Indian does. My mentor seemed to be standing on a disadvantage position when reporting to him. The presentation did not go very smoothly. My manager kept asking what is the motivation of this and that, and told them to put this and that on the slides. Looks like I will have to prepare a lot when I present to him in the future. >> (Please don’t debug this blog.) -- DAY 6 Weekend! If you didn’t skip this long post, maybe you can give me some feedback on my IG story. I will appreciate it very much. Catch you in the next one. Peace.
1 Comment
李勃是
6/11/2020 11:04:35 pm
LANG PI GUU TAI SHEN LA!!!
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
Archives
January 2024
|