It's AWESOME here. I'm having such a good time so far. The city is huge and exciting and I'm going to need many more weekends to sufficiently explore it. However, I'm going to skip over all of my first week and the explorations therein and save that for a later date. I just started work today, so I'm going to just write about that because it's fresh and I'm too lazy to write about everything right now.
Today I started my six(!) month internship at SAP, in their new and tiny Innovations Center. You probably know SAP from their business software, payroll and all that, but they have some pretty cool stuff going on here. My department is located in Potsdam, a short train ride outside of Berlin, at the Hasso Plattner Institute, started and headed by one of SAP's co-founders, Hasso Plattner (surprise!). The college itself focuses on IT, and we have a few students working for and with our department.
My group/department is very small: only around ten people at the moment, including myself and the new hires. I'm really enjoying the size, though, as it makes the atmosphere less rigid and more start-up-like. I came to the group with one manager, but it's so flexible that I've been talking to everyone about their projects and I have a lot of decision making power about what I want to work on. I spent a good part of today meeting people and learning all about the different projects going on in the group.
I have three-ish projects that it looks like I'll be working on to begin with. The first concerns an extraordinarily huge amount of data about patient blood samples, and how we can efficiently manage and analyze all that. The second is actually an MIT-affiliated project and my favorite so far, trying to forecast demand for a product at a some specific store so the supplier can more efficiently ship the product to the distributer. The last, which I think I'll only be marginally involved with, is the development of an efficient data structure for their custom database system. This one sounds awesome and hard and straight out of 6.046; I was wishing for my copy of CLRS and maybe access to some office hours as the guy was explaining it to me.
All that plus free coffee, free lunch (every day!), and a beautiful campus made for a pretty excellent first day :) And I'm doing it all again tomorrow!
