Most companies are wrapping up their intern hiring by this time, so I wanted to make sure that I had a backup plan in case Google didn’t come through. I interviewed for a few positions at IBM over break and got two job offers that sound interesting and challenging. Both want a response by this Friday. I’m not willing to let those go in order to chase a Google internship that may not happen, so I’ve let the Google recruiter know that I’m on a tight time schedule in hopes that she can find me a group within the week.

I’m not sure how the intern hiring process works at Google. The recruiter mentioned that it can take anywhere from “one week to two months” to find an appropriate match, and that matches are made based on “intern experience, skills, and interview feedback.” The emails that she sends make it sound like they want to hire me, but they’ve really let the ball drop these past few weeks. I think that they must be busy trying to hire people to fill full-time positions. I also wonder if maybe this process would have gone faster if I had applied for an internship out in California, where they have more of their workforce.

Either way, I’ve got another week until I have to make a decision. Both options have their merits. If I work at IBM, I can live at home for free and hang out with all of my friends. I would give all that up, though, to have the chance to live in New York City and meet a whole new set of people. I think I’ll be happy no matter which way it goes, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed anyway…

Update: The second interview went alright. There were more abstract math questions this time, more emphasis on algorithms rather than data structures, although there were a few questions about trees and lists at the beginning. Once again, the interviewer was really interested in hearing my thought process, so I tried to think out loud as I was solving the problems.