Adding Value to Internship

Published:
March 18, 2016

Toby Baratta ’17, a computer science and political science double major, is in the second semester of her current Mentored Advanced Project (MAP). She’s applying her computer science skills to associate professor Jerod Weinman’s massive historical mapping project, which aims to make historical and geographical data in archived map collections searchable on the Web.

Baratta’s research presentation at the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference netted her an invitation to intern at Google last summer. She says her presentation experience plus Grinnell’s emphasis on writing combined to make a substantive difference in the quality of her internship:

“Doing research with Professor Weinman, I was writing a paper every week,” Baratta says. “Writing is emphasized in every class. You learn how to write really well and convey your understanding of material in a way that most people who have engineering degrees can’t. Some people who have English degrees can’t make metaphors regarding biological differences, but at Grinnell they can. They’ve taken those courses, and they took them because they enjoyed it.

“At Google every week I would meet with my team and say, ‘This is what we’ve done, this is what we’re going to continue doing, these are the things that we’re hung up on, and these are questions we have that aren’t implementation questions.’ I’m not a code monkey; I don’t just sit there and type. I have to think about what my assumptions imply about what I’m doing.

“When you’re in industry you have to convey why what you’re doing is important, and why the company should be spending money on it. And you need to be able to say it in a way that doesn’t sound like X equals Y equals Z. I mean, people don’t need to know the technical details of every little thing. Being able to convey what I am doing in a way that’s understandable to people who aren’t computer science majors is so important.”

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