Rob Radez: rradez _at

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Extreme Blue, Summer 2005

July 28, 2005

We're really feeling the pressure for Expo, which is in a couple weeks. Putting the finishing touches on our code and preparing our demo, on top of the normal workload of presentations and meetings, is taking quite a bit of time. On the plus side, I still maintain that my team has the best set of mentors out of all the projects. They managed to get us before a patent review board fairly early in the program, and we now have a few patent searches going. I also managed to get some time for a one-on-one phone call with Irving Wladawsky-Berger and a face-to-face meeting with Dan Frye, both of whom were kind enough to talk with me about a variety of topics. I had originally been planning on writing more about my experience this summer, but we've been busy enough that I just haven't been able to. Although, to be fair, I've also spent some time after the day ends honing my foosball skills with the other interns.

July 8, 2005

We're another 2 weeks in, and it was nice to have a 4-day long 4th of July weekend. People scattered to the winds, heading home or off to see friends. When we got back on Wednesday, a group of high school students in Duke's LEAD program came in and spent some time learning about IBM, then they broke up into smaller groups and designed either the dorm, car, or cell phone of the future. A couple of us facilitated these small groups, and my group chose to design the dorm of the future. They picked up the IBM lingo pretty quick and named the design "Dorm onDemand". It was cool to see their energy and ideas. We're also starting to hit high gear on a number of different fronts, not only our projects but placement, patents, and presentation too. We're cranking out a fair bit of code now and working through our ideas for our deliverables. Placement addresses the recruitment aspect of Extreme Blue; if we do well enough, there's a good chance of getting some job offers. We've also been thinking through ideas for patents. We're in a leading edge space and we've already had a bunch of what we think are potentially novel and useful ideas. We had a meeting with our mentors where we had a great discussion and brainstorming session about a bunch of our ideas. On the presentation front, we've been trying to figure out what kind of demo we want to do at Expo in Armonk. We're also starting to design our poster for the poster session there and fine tuning our 1-minute and 4-minute presentations.
Cool thing of the week: emailing a VP out of the blue asking for time on his calendar, and then getting it.

June 22, 2005

We're almost 4 weeks into the program now. I personally think that the project I'm on is one of the cooler ones in the Raleigh lab, and my teammates and mentors are amazing. Not only very intelligent but also fun to be around. We've got a good amount of inter-team socializing going on also, which is certainly helped by all living in the same apartment complex. It's taken us a while to get up to speed on all the background information and technologies that we're using, as well as to develop a plan to attack our problem. We're starting to hit our stride though. Amongst all the work on the project, we've also had a bunch of other stuff going on. We've presented to I think 6 major execs now, people who control major amounts of resources. We've had a group outing to a baseball game, free tickets to a comedy show, a couple parties, and gone to a ropes course (which wasn't really a ropes course). This is all a bit stream-of-conciousness as I try to remember the past month. There's been a lot of work, and to be sure, some of the IBM bureaucracy really sucks, but at the same time there are some nice perks. The free housing is one of the major ones, as is the access to executives, opportunities for full time jobs, and various free stuff. And while there's still the difficulties of IBM politics and sheer size to deal with, Extreme Blue is definitely not the same as a standard internship. It's opened my eyes to things like 'emerging business opportunities' which are like startups inside of IBM, and dealing with the other teams has given me a good look at the areas that they're dealing with (including helping out a project up in Toronto).

Links:

Official IBM Extreme Blue site