EAV Chapt 7, 7b(2)

I once did a three-month internship at Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) in the summer of 2006. At that moment, SGI was developing and testing its new released high-performance reconfigurable computer and I was hired to write applications for performance testing. The working environment was quite typical and I was assigned a cube in a big office. The employees at SGI were always happy to help when I encountered any technical problems. Because I already knew the platform I was going to use before the internship started, I was able to begin my work from day one. In the meantime, my supervisor at SGI didn’t assign other work to me except the application development; so that I was able to focus on one single task and produce a lot of result at the end. Overall, I was doing the work I was interested; I was able to get the help immediately when problem arose; and I was paid quite well too. However, the disadvantage of this three-month internship is that I didn’t get a lot of challenges. I knew what and how I was going to do even before I went to SGI; hence, I just moved from one application to another one and didn't have a lot of chances to try something beyond my knowledge. Although I accumulated a lot of experience for one particular task, my overall knowledge didn’t grow. I believe the latter is more important.