Parmita's Blog

As a Technovation Alumn , I was invited to attend the Google Science Fair this year! It was so amazing and inspiring to see the world-shaping inventions these young people are creating. Dianna Cowern aka Physics Girl was MCing the awards ceremony And I was soooo excited because she has had such a huge impact on my life! She was one of the first YouTubers I ever subscribed to and introduced me to the amazing world of educational YouTube videos (it's not just for cat videos, you say!?!?)  Getting to meet her, talk about some of my interests, and thank her for her impact on my life was definitely a highlight! :D

This summer I got the incredible experience of interning at Splunk!!! There are so many different things I could write about from my experience, but lemme just big a couple main ones: 1) Big vs Small (or more accurately mid-sized company vs startup, but that doesn't have the same ring to it) 2) CI/CD + CL! (Continuous Integration and Development   +   Continuous Learning!) Part 1: Big Company vs Small Company  My last internship was at a startup ( see more about it here ), and the onboarding process was many miles away from the way it was at Splunk. To introduce myself at the startup, I could literally just say “Hi!” loud enough and everyone in the 1-floor office would hear me. But Splunk has close to 5 thousand employees across the world! Understandably this leads to quite a different experience. Everyday, I have the opportunity to meet someone new. I have the chance to meet people with so many different interests. Almost like a college, there are also different

I have been obsessed with Hamilton for a while now.  My friends know it: I’ve drawn my favorite characters and made too many comics about them to count.  I’ve listened to the 2 hours and 23 minute soundtrack so many times... ...that my music suggestions are definitely skewed: (all these singers are from the Original Broadway Cast Album recording of Hamilton) and I can sing pretty much every part (or at least attempt to--I never said I was a good singer)  And that screenshot is from the official Hamiton app, which I have been religiously checking every single day since I came back to San Francisco for the summer. Why? Hamilton is playing in SF, and I figured, why not apply for the ticket lottery? Basically, I’d apply for the next day’s lottery at 11 am every day and  every day at around 9 am I would see It just became a habit. I didn’t even think about it. I could locate the “Try Again” notification and reapply for the next lotte

I was sponsored to attend VentureBeat’s Transform AI Conference! It was my very first time going to a conference like that and I learned a lot! I’m also super grateful to my manager, Medha, who not only gave me the time to go attend, but also encouraged me to go and share what I learned with the team. Here’s the presentation I made for my team recapping what happened (link) And few screenshots (cause we all know no one is gonna be bothered to click that link :P )

Since there are Splunk offices are all over the world, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit one of the remote offices in Vancouver! This was a big experience for me for many reasons. There was the obvious reason of being able to work with my team members who I had only ever seen as tiny pixels on a Zoom meeting screen and finally get to see them in real life. But for me honestly, the biggest thing I got was a huge sense of independence. For one, I had never traveled internationally before. That was kind of cool (managing passports and international papers on my own for the first time), but really not too different from whenever I travel across the US for school. But most importantly (and most ironically) was independence from technology. I realize just how dependent I am on technology during travel, but I was about to get a rude awakening on arriving to Vancouver. Think about it. If you are about to travel somewhere new what do you do to prepare? Well, the answer

I was featured in SCS Day again!!! Last year (link) I had a small display with a handful of my comics. It was a lot of fun being featured as well as attending and seeing everyone else’s diverse range of talents.  This year, I got the opportunity to be featured again and had a lot more art to share. I got an entire wall of my art and comics and to be honest it was almost overwhelming! I’ve openly shared my art online to thousands of people, but that has never really been nerve-wracking since I don’t actually know those people. But here, my work was blown up and put on the walls of the Gates computer science building--the same building I practically live in and seen by all the people I work with and respect. That has a completely different feeling to it and while I was proud of my work I also felt a little scared. Would they like it? What if my students saw it? Will people see me differently? Would people think of me as less of a serious computer scientist if they saw this sill

I’ve been making fun comic strips and fanart for as long as I can remember. This has mostly been a solo activity since I didn’t know any other people who were interested in making them too. But then last year at CMU’s Activity Fair I came across Artist Alley--a club dedicated to people making fanart like I do! Of course, I immediately joined and it has been so much fun. And this year, I even tabled at the Activity Fair myself! Some of the art pieces are mine :) It has been such a great experience being with a community of people who enjoy the same niche things that I do. One of the biggest benefits has been the structured improvement of my art skills. I have never actually taken an art class, so everything I’ve learned about art has been through online tutorials and just looking at a lot of other artist’s work. But at Artist Alley, I joined a mentor-mentee program where I get weekly assignments and critique from a more experienced artist. Until now, I never really had the o