Grad Students Song Gao, Yingjie Hu, and Olaf Menzer Land Top Internships

UCSB Geography graduate student Song Gao has landed a Software Engineering Summer Internship at the Apple Maps Group. He was inspired to apply by an Apple job posting for a Data Scientist on Linkedln. The job description was a good match for Song’s research interests and skills, particularly regarding large-scale data mining and GIS processing (check out the March 14 article about his frontier research in spatial computing using Hadoop). Song first applied in November 2013, he got his first reply from Apple HR in February 2014, and, after three rounds of interviews by Apple engineers and managers, he got a job offer. Song says that he’s excited about getting this competitive offer and hopes to contribute to the new version of Apple Maps with his geospatial knowledge and GIS expertise. He also wants to thank Geography Alumna Indy Hurt (who works at Apple) for guiding him through the whole process.

Not to be outdone, Yingjie Hu landed a summer internship with Esri: “I will be working in the Application Prototype Lab (APL) located at Esri’s headquarter in Redlands. APL is a research lab which focuses on designing the prototypes for Esri’s next-generation products. During this summer, I will be working on a project to develop a Linked-Data-driven  framework for ArcGIS Online. This prototype framework could also be applied to facilitate the content organization and map-based resource discovery in general geoportals. Hopefully this work will contribute not only to Esri but to the general GIS community as well.”

Olaf Menzer rounds out our exceptionally talented trio of summer interns with news that he will also be interning this summer. Olaf says he will be in Berkeley at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), for their Advanced Computing for Science Department: “In this internship, I will be participating in research leading to development and evaluation of flux processing codes in support of building the AmeriFlux and FLUXNET datasets which are used by researchers across the globe for climate and biome understanding studies.”