Interning at Kosmix − 11 May, 2007
The second semester of my first year of Ph.D. studies at Indiana University's School of Informatics concluded with a trip to CHI 2007 in San Jose and the start of my first internship, with the Mountain View startup Kosmix.
The Kosmix gig is ideal is practically every way. I get to telecommute from Indiana, visiting the California office every few weeks for face-to-face presentations and further brainstorming. The first week here has been very illuminating, with a number of projects bubbling up through initial conversations to make the summer quite promising. I miss my family, though, and am grateful to avoid traumatizing Amy and the boys with a prolonged absence. As it is, the 16 days I have been away will be the longest separation of both my marriage and my parenthood. Thank God for computer-mediated communication.
At Kosmix, I also am reunited with Shveta, one of my master's program colleagues and teammates in our winning CHI 2005 student design competition team, mPath. The financial considerations also meet my goals of having a "real" job for the summer downtime, to help pay for the academic work the other eight months of the year. Things will still be tight, but significantly better than the past two summers in Bloomington.
Best of all, I get to do the work I am trained to do. This isn't a summer of wireframes and CSS. I actually get to create strategic designs and ground decisions in user need. This is almost textbook (if we had one of those) project work learned at the School of Informatics. I couldn't have asked for a better match.
[Maybe on one of the future visits, I'll get to put faces to usernames of some of the other social networking folk I've met online. If you are one of them and live in the extended Mountain View area, let me know when you'll be around this summer, and I'll try to aim return trips for those weeks.]
The Kosmix gig is ideal is practically every way. I get to telecommute from Indiana, visiting the California office every few weeks for face-to-face presentations and further brainstorming. The first week here has been very illuminating, with a number of projects bubbling up through initial conversations to make the summer quite promising. I miss my family, though, and am grateful to avoid traumatizing Amy and the boys with a prolonged absence. As it is, the 16 days I have been away will be the longest separation of both my marriage and my parenthood. Thank God for computer-mediated communication.
At Kosmix, I also am reunited with Shveta, one of my master's program colleagues and teammates in our winning CHI 2005 student design competition team, mPath. The financial considerations also meet my goals of having a "real" job for the summer downtime, to help pay for the academic work the other eight months of the year. Things will still be tight, but significantly better than the past two summers in Bloomington.
Best of all, I get to do the work I am trained to do. This isn't a summer of wireframes and CSS. I actually get to create strategic designs and ground decisions in user need. This is almost textbook (if we had one of those) project work learned at the School of Informatics. I couldn't have asked for a better match.
[Maybe on one of the future visits, I'll get to put faces to usernames of some of the other social networking folk I've met online. If you are one of them and live in the extended Mountain View area, let me know when you'll be around this summer, and I'll try to aim return trips for those weeks.]
