Summer’s Tedium
I had originally planned on spending this summer to chill and relax - my “summer of self-discovery” - but it seems that I can’t handle the responsibility that comes with so much free time. At the end of the school year, I applied for and was accepted for a position at a start-up company this summer in Silicon Valley. There are four Princeton students - two recent graduates, a rising junior, and a rising sophomore (me). And as cliche as working in Silicon Valley sounds, it’s proving to be an enormously valuable experience.
Without spilling too many details, I am doing front-end development for an online network that allows people to display, buy, and sell art. Obviously, there are competitors out there, but we’ve developed some pretty revolutionary approaches that no one has thought of yet, so it will be very interesting to see how things pan out.
My responsibilities as of right now are primarily centered around design and coding, namely the website and the facebook application. Since I do print design normally, it’s been really awesome to take on a different mindset for web design, which is centered around UX and functionality, two entirely different concerns from the purely artistic perspective that I did before. It’s been fun to pick up HTML and CSS again and actually learn about coding websites the legit way - conforming to W3C standards and developing crazy stylesheets. At the same time, I’m learning other programming languages as my responsibilities increase, and the cool thing about a start-up is that no one has a compartmentalized role. Everyone is racking their brains together to make decisions about the direction the company will take, and at times that responsibility places me in situations where I have to make decisions I lack the confidence for.
On the other hand, the good thing about a small company like a start-up is the chill and laidback environment. I genuinely look forward to going to work everyday because everyone is just awesome, and I am constantly learning a lot. Moreover, the real value of this experience comes not from professional experience or acquiring new skills, but rather from learning things about myself and perhaps what sort of direction to take for the future. As of now, nothing’s ironed out, but I am slowly finding out what kinds of things I like to do. I’ll keep you guys updated on what’s going on!
