(Disclaimer: Here comes a flood of long overdue posts.)
now playing: Love Myself | Hailee Steinfield
mood: reminiscing
So I come back from Scandinavia and a week later I'm off to Austin, TX for the conclusion of my summer internship. As part of the 12% of the interns chosen to attend the conference, I feel blessed and thankful for the opportunity to be able to meet and listen to the stories of so many people that inspire and influence women in STEM. The night before we flew out, we actually went back to school for last minute edits and rehearsals (oh gosh the life of being in our lab- hectic, nerve-wrecking, but worth it in the end). I ended up getting the posters printed at 11pm back home, which reminds me I still need to ask W for reimbursements....
{Sunday} | We flew out bright and early in the morning from LAX.
N, S, M and I were on the same flight. D flew out at 6a, and I believe W flew out after us at 10a. S and I had breakfast from the Lemonade LA stand in terminal 4, and all four of us flew out of LA with Delta at 8am. We got into Austin at 2pm..ish and took the blue shuttle that the company provided for us to The Renaissance Hotel. The hotel was very pleasant and perfect for hosting professional events. With 10ish floors and open courtyard high ceiling with all the rooms facing the courtyard, it was beautiful during the day and night. All our events were hosted in the hotel, in the meeting rooms, ballrooms, and the courtyard. When we got to the hotel, we checked in, set our posters up, and met up with the other LB group. At around 4pm all of the hosted interns (I say this because there are fellowship students, industry members, corporate members, professors as well as individual visitors ....and some events are invited interns exclusive only) gathered for a group picture then headed out to Lady Bird Lake in downtown for a river cruise social and to see the bats that live under the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge.
The river cruise dinner social was a pretty lovely event by itself because I met a lot of students from Georgia Tech (random but happened to sit together) while enjoying what I happened to be craving at the moment - GUAC♥. L E L but for realZ they served mexican food/fajitas that evening on the boat, as well as an open bar (which is quite interesting because for the next three days there was always a time (or times) during the day where we would have access to an open bar). On the last third of our boat journey, the sun was starting to go down and Austin's city skyline suddenly served as a beautiful backdrop to the sun setting. The bats were quite a spectacular scene as well. There were many other boats on the lake waiting for the bats to fly out, as well as many pedestrians standing at the top of the bridge looking down and waiting. I thought that because most of the residents are familiar with this bat bridge, that they wouldn't be watching the little mammals fly out. But boy was I wrong, the bridge was PACKED. The event ended at 9 and we got back at around 10p. Nothing spectacular happened after besides walking to the Target two streets down with D N and M to buy snacks and water.
{Monday} | Breakfast was served at 6 and everything was buffet style. (Most meals were served as buffet style in the conference, besides dinner which was brought out in a three course style).
After breakfast we had a guest speaker event, and then followed by back to back seminars, talks, lunch, workshops, 2 poster sessions, and the intern presentations. D and I were partners for poster session so we were pretty nervous because he's never presented a poster, and I was nervous because of all the industry members that were present. But things went great and we supported each other the best we could, filling in for each other when a poster visitor tested us on foreign knowledge or asked us about the impossible. In between every rotation for the events they had Starbucks, snacks, and soda for us which we all took to our advantage to keep us from boredom, freezing to death, and hunger (LOL). Before dinner there was an open bar reception. With the sun setting, the dusk shadows sunk through the glass ceilings of the courtyard, making everything gorgeous along with the candles around the high standing tables in the reception area.
That evening, S M N and I took an über to downtown and went bar hopping on 6th. Well, attempted to because we didn't end up hopping, we just stayed at one bar..and honestly I don't know what it's called even though I tried to Google Map stalk the location. But they had a really good dj that night so we stayed until they closed...it was pretty funny but great. I'd say you were lucky if you got to see our snaps xD
Things were pretty turnt until we got back to the hotel entrance. No need for explaining.
{Tuesday} | Due to last night's event, S and I missed breakfast LOL. But we had another great and eventful day filled with activities, presentations, and poster sessions back to back.
Tuesday night was quite lovely to be honest. The most exciting event of Tuesday was the career event, which was like a mini-career fair but limited to Intel, Micron, IBM, Raytheon, ARM, AMD, ADI, Freescale, GlobalFoundaries, and Texas Instrument. (I don't think I missed anyone)It was very nerve-wrecking but fun at the same time. M and I teamed up and we did a duo where we would introduce ourselves as a team then split based on our specialties and fields lolol, this was very effective and people liked it because we were able to answer a larger variety of questions based on our knowledge/specialization together. This worked well until Intel broke us up because they wanted to interview 1-1. Another open bar with lots of chips, guac, and 4 types of salsa. After the career-industry session, we had our dinner banquet, award presentation, along with raffles. Raffles were pretty cool, most companies raffled off smart watches, Fitbits, and Micron raffled off a SSD as well as an ASUS laptop!! ~pros of being in the tech industry~
That evening we tried to live Monday nights' bar hop but it wasn't effective because we couldn't find the other interns (which, we figured couldn't bar hop yet because most of them were only 20 or 19) and for some reason it wasn't turnt enough. But we went to a few bars and ended up getting delicious NY-style pizza.
{Wednesday} | After three days of semi-formal wear, buffets, business card and resume trading, socializing with bright engineers/individuals from a variety of schools (s/o to princeton, u michigan, georgia tech for being our main buddies), open bars, listening to inspirational talks (thank you Barbara McAllister!), meeting Intel/Micron and other industry members, presenting our posters and defending them for each other, running into students from our collaborators' labs, and just pure fun..... we finally left to catch our 1pm flight back to LA.
It was such a fun and eye-opening experience that I get to treasure for a lifetime. I'm so glad I was able to meet so many other engineers and network with the different companies :)
-i
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