Long time no see!

Lots of (exciting) things have happened since I last posted, so get ready for updates.

One of the biggest piece of news is that I got appointed as a graduate research assistant. This gave me the opportunity to work with a lot of brilliant people on very engaging projects. Due to my experience as an intern with the Digital Science Center and the Science and Engineering Library, I became more structured and thorough in the way I do research.

Internship search was a big hassle overall! I had quite a few interviews, but due to the busy nature of any Columbia student, I found it hard to prepare properly. The result was a series of rejections until I finally decided to sit down and study for an upcoming interview with Bank of America. Thanks to Ellie and Jeffrey, my supervisors, I managed to identify, correct and/or improve on a series of bad interviewing habits. And it worked! I’m going to be an software engineering intern for the summer in the Global Markets and Technology department.

With regards to the DS Internship (cause this is what I should writing about, no?) has been going good as well. Scheduling tweets is now officially in the job description and configuring or analyzing social media is getting close. I say this because it’s more and more interesting how institutions that are known to focus strictly on print materials (i.e. libraries) are becoming (and need to become) power users of the digital world. This semester I got to host a workshop on how to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop “not just for making pretty pictures”, in other words a guide for scientists and engineers. This was my fourth workshop of the sort and the attendance was quite good. I still need to work on my “workshop-giving” skills, since I have the tendency to skip steps that to me are natural, but that to beginners are not quite as intuitive.

What’s next? I still want to learn 3D software and develop a mobile application that enhances students’ experience in NYC. I’ll keep you posted on the progress!

Andrei