Internship @ ESRI - Day 1

I wrote earlier about my summer internship at ESRI. That time I wasn't very sure what it'll be like working for this company. Plus there was this whole hassle of moving to Redlands for the summer. Not to mention I had my finals and project submissions/presentations to take care of. In all that frenzy I never thought about how it would be like once I am there at the headquarters of the Global GIS leader.

But I was pleasantly surprised by the way I was treated today, my 1st day at ESRI. First, the headquarter is more like a college campus. The lush green grass and countless trees (protecting you from the deadly heat) just brings smile to your face. Secondly, the offices are well equipped with state-of-the-art technology yet they are designed to preserve as much normalcy as possible. And finally, the people who made ESRI the global leader, are not only intelligent and creative group of people but also they are friendly, courteous and welcoming.

Today was mostly about providing me with the general idea off ESRI products. However, I am more excited about the task that I will be eventually assigned: programming in C#.net. What? Do you think that I will actually tell you about the task. I am no Mark Jen :-)


Well I will keep posting about my experience at ESRI. Anybody out there who is thinking about joining ESRI as an intern or full-time employee, please don't waste time , just join the company. It is a great place with lot of cool innovation and development underway. Will it help if I tell you that they have far more advanced tool then Google maps?

"I don't need extra credit"

Today was the day that I had to present my AI project to the class. I was prepared for the Spam filter and the Spell checker that I created using Naive Bayes Classifier. My power point slides were ready to impress everybody. I was anxiously waiting for my turn to present. However my professor had some different idea. She decided to go through some of the material related to our assignment.

She went on and on and on, until only 15 minutes were left. I knew that I won't be able to present today but definitely I have to present on Wednesday(which will be our last class before the finals).

After the class I went to the professor and told her how I am more than prepared to present my project. To my utter bewilderment she said "Oh you don't need to present, you don't need extra credit" because I was doing well in my class. (The presentation was for extra credit and was optional). I tried to argue that even if I am doing well, I still wanted to present but to no avail.

So it seems like that I won't be able to show my work to the class. I was upset because all the hard work (power point slides) will go unnoticed but at the same time I was glad to hear that I am doing pretty well in my class.

Oh well, everything happens for a reason. (I am just not sure what it is)

Update: So I was finally able to present my project. It turns out that not many students were willing to show their work which worked out for me :)