Parmita's Blog

Just came back from a trip to Google Pittsburgh! For the past few years, Carnegie Mellon has taken the incoming class for the School of Computer Science to a trip to Google Pittsburgh. Pretty fitting, considering the Dean of the School of Computer Science, Andrew Moore, was also behind creating the Google engineering office in Pittsburgh. It was truly an inspiring experience. On top of the fact that the campus is so lively and fun, it was amazing to hear from actual CMU alumni--people who had been in exactly my shoes a few years ago--talk about their experiences and accomplishments at Google. One of the major things that really struck me was how committed everyone was to making an impact and making a difference. Most of the time, when you think of Google, you think of the search engine, or maybe Google Calendar or Google Drive. On top of these obviously useful products, Google also spends a massive amount of resources into improving the world through outreach programs. A pr...

Just came back from the amazing event hosted by Nutanix, a data center infrastructure and cloud computing software company.   It was extremely engaging as we started off with a design workshop and competition (My team and I won 2nd place!) We also had an extremely informative speaker panel of women who work at Nutanix which opened my eyes to how varied jobs in the tech industry truly are. Not everyone is a software engineer or coder--people do all sorts of jobs in all segments of a tech company, and it was interesting to see how all the differing roles meshed and interworked to create a whole company. I was also lucky enough to get to talk to the CEO Dheeraj Pandey of Nutanix, and he gave some excellent advice about staying motivated and always looking forward. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to attend.

Today I had the awesome experience of getting a tour of the Video Game Dev company, Zynga! It was really fun and engaging. First, we got to play a bunch of arcade and video games (of course!), but after that, I got to see an amazing presentation by Kasey McKenna, a senior software engineer at Zynga. She explained her problem-solving process for a part of the Zynga game, Farmville: Tropic Escape. The task was to animate a boat making a delivery, making sure that it hit certain key points on the way there. With simple code, the boat made sharp, jerky motions, awkwardly arriving at its destination. However, after working through the problem, Kasey applied calculus and parametric curves to simulate the natural smooth curving of the boat’s path.   It was super interesting to see the calculus I learn in school applied in real-life in someone’s actual job! And here's what the finished result looks like: Overall, it was a lot of fun and definitely an e...