After summer after summer locked in the realm of remote work and quarantining, I finally had my first ever in-person summer! For this summer, I decided to travel far, far away — out of Berkeley, out of California, out of the West Coast. This summer, I headed to the greatest city that ever was, or ever could be — it’s NEW YORK CITY, BABY!
Alexa play concrete jungle wet dream tomato
This summer, I interned at Vanta. Vanta works in security and compliance, with the mission to secure the internet. If you’ve ever gotten the “your password has been compromised” message from chrome, or the “sorry we leaked your data” email, Vanta wants to make that a thing of the past. My second week at the internship, they raised a bunch to bring the vision to life.
I worked on developing a product-wide commenting feature as well as a notifications flow for back-and-forth on documents within Vanta. Both of these were big projects — publicized within and outside the compmany as deliverables for the quarter. This made it quite exciting to drive these projects, and I was amazed by the level of trust and ownership I got. This internship was a special one for me, and I’m very grateful for the chance to make massive impact.
Vanta also wrote about what I did this summer haha. You can read it here.
I also started doing research part-time! I started working in the intersection of Programming Systems and Artificial Intelligence, and how the two interact with one another. Think: Github Copilot, but better. I’m researching program synthesis under Koushik Sen this semester, and spinning up my own project.
I have been learning a lot of things about research — both good and bad — as well as starting to spin up state of the art projects and improving upon them. I still have a long ways to go, but it’s been a fun journey, and I’m excited to continue it the coming semester!
I started lifting a lot more this summer — getting particular about getting stronger! I finally built myself back up to be able to do push ups, and am on my way to being a pull out/chin dips beast. Still a bunch of work to do, but I’m pretty happy with my progress!
I also started climbing in earnest — getting into and learning deeply about bouldering! It’s a fun activity that I hope to continue doing in the future. I also got my top rope certification, to climb the big walls as well.
My strength (or rather, the lack thereof) has always been a bit of a sore spot for me. I hope to push myself physically in the next year or so. I want to try to be my best self physically, the way I try intellectually as well.