Background
Some weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending the silicon valley trip with 24 other SFU folks. It was also my first time to the states. I wrote this post as a sort of diary and reflections of what I had experienced in the trip and maybe also for those who are thinking to join next year and see what it’s all about.
In case you are interested in watching the trip, Isabelle has made an amazing vlog of the trip.
Introduction
SFU CSSS Silicon Valley Trip is a trip organized by SFU Computing Science Student Society for SFU students to go visit big tech offices around the so-called Silicon Valley. Those who attend are primarily from CS majors, but I also see some handful of Data Science, Statistics, and Computer Engineering students who attend in this trip.
Here’s the reason on why I joined (ordered by stronger reason):
- The only time in my undergrad life where I can have a 5-day trip with some strong SFU students in their disciplines.
- Get to know SFU Alumni (and also non-SFU too) who have ‘made’ their way and learn from them
- See how life is like in California
- Slightly subsidized trip $$$ :D
- I have never been to US!
And those are the reasons on why I joined. I think some people there are joining mainly because they wanna have a good time with people. Networking also plays quite a role here, but I personally do not fixate on this as I think a good enough cold networking might do the job too.
Getting into the Trip
During my time, The application was opened on October 10, 2023. From what I have heard, roughly 100 people applied. Around half of those (50) are interviewed. And then there are around 20-23 spots for the attendants. Few of my friends also got in or waitlisted then got in, but declined due to US Visa Issue :)). The interview was a 15-min get-to-know you and your reasons on why you wanna join the trip. Preference are also given to students in upper-years and have co-op experience.
Keep in mind that the date and spots amount may change every year.
If you can’t bother with the trip logistics, skip over to Takeaways for the lessons I learned.
The Trip
Our trip is a 5-day trip from Tuesday, April 30 to Saturday, May 4 (2024). We stayed in DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel near the airport. Roundtrip flights using Air Canada. We visited 5 companies - Futurewei, Nvidia, Discord, Tesla, and Google. There are quite some free time throughout the trip which I really appreciate. We also had an alumni reception + networking night which was a really banger time and opportunity to get to know SFU Alumnis who worked down here.
Here are the rough schedule breakdown for the trip.
Note:
- Nested 1, 2, 3 refers to Morning, Afternoon, and Evening
- Free is freetime and in the bracket is the planned optional hangout
- Tue, Apr 30
- Flight
- Free (Golden Gate Bridge)
- Free (Pier 39)
- Wed, May 1
- Intel Museum + Futurewei
- Nvidia
- Free (Alcatraz Prison)
- Thu, May 2
- Discord
- Computer History Museum
- Alumni Reception Night
- Fri, May 3
- Tesla
- Free (Twin Peaks)
- Sat, May 4
- Free (SF Museum of Modern Art)
- Flight
If you don’t care about the specifics of what happened on the trip and only wanted to know what I have generally learned. Feel free to skip over to Takeaways
Day 1
Our Day 1 starts at having to come to the airport at 5am. To save uber cost and make sure I woke up, I stayed a night at a friend’s place before. We got to the airport pretty early and got to meet the peeps at airport! We had air canada
The flight was delayed by 30 mins. oh well..
We finally landed successfully! Yayyy! Tried the SFO’s AirTrain and normal train, then went to try In-N-Out Burger.
The burger itself was quite interesting as the patty is crispy. As the price is relatively cheap compared to other burger places, I’d recommend! After this, we went to the hotel and rested for 30 mins. We played ‘tennis’ on nintendo switch with some group of friends. The trip is then continued with us going to the golden gate bridge!
On the way to the bridge, our uber driver was really nice and shared a lot of things about the city. He also let us to stop for 10 mins to stop by at Palace Of Fine Arts. It was such an amazing place to visit and lots of cool pics are taken there!! Reminded me of the roman empire that I think about at least once a week ;).
We continued the uber trip to Golden Gate Bridge. It’s such an amazing sight after looking at it in-person. What amazes me more is the always-perfect weather in here. Perfect sky (just lacks cloud), light, and temperature. We spent most of the time taking photos as we should.
After that, we visited Ghirardelli to look at the fancy restaurants and gift shops. We didn’t eat here as the price seems higher than our tax bracket. I got a chocolate as a gift from the Ghirardelli chocolate experience.
We continued walking to fisherman’s wharf and went sightseeing the shops. It seems surreal and the architectures are just so different from Vancouver. We went to one of the shops and had dinner and had clam chowder. It tastes delicious! though I ate too much bread as the bowls is made of bread.
We ended the rest of evening taking more walks until Pier 39 and ubered back to the hotel and sleep.
Day 2
We started the day with a breakfast in the hotel and went straight to the Intel Museum. We went touring into how Intel is founded, brief history of the chips, and of course, explanation of the Moore’s Law. The tour was guided by the employee from Futurewei. There was also a gift shop
We continued the day going into Futurewei office to see their presentation and meet their engineers. The company seems to specialize in low-level stuff and many of the engineers are doing research and have graduate degrees. It brings an interesting perspective of the industry and see people working hard in this domain.
We continued going into Nvidia office after this to meet an SFU Alumni, Arash Vahdat, he finished his PHD from SFU and worked a few years at D-Wave Systems prior to joining Nvidia. The office itself was really big and the orange juice was really fresh!
Arash has a really bright energy and very welcoming to us. His passion in his subject and care by accompanying us throughout the office trip really made the whole group felt really welcomed. Such a great guy! More details on the lessons learned on the below section!
We ubered back to the hotel after this and take a quick rest before going to Alcatraz. It is an island dedicated for prison back in the day. This is an optional trip, but most of the group planned to go here. We walked quite nice steps and was interesting to see how the prison worked and looked like.
We finished the trip, went for a quick trip around the city, and went back to hotel again!
Day 3
Day 3 is here and after breakfast, we went to the discord office. This was one of the most anticipated office to tour with personally. The office is not as fancy from the outside, but I really like the cozy and cute vibe of the office. An SFU Alumni also guided the tour around the office. Discord office was really cool! Lots of merchs, decoration, gaming room. We had a career panel with 5 Discord Engineers who all studied from Canadian University. It was a really informative session and the group asked really interesting questions for them. It was quite relatable though they are really cracked and have worked really hard to get here.
The food highlight of the trip was the Thai food offered for lunch. Maybe because it was the first Asian food of the trip, but it was the most flavourful (free) food of the trip.
After this, we went to Computer History Museum (CHM). It’s quite a big museum explaining all the stuff around computers. The time allocated was only 2 hours, so we kinda had to speedrun it on the second-half. Overall, some earlier parts are interesting though it’s kinda hard for me to understand all the concepts hahaha. There are lots of cool computer things and history, softwares, games, and gift shop in the end.
We went to one of the highlight of the trip after this, which is Alumni Reception Dinner. A lot of cool SFU Alumnis that works in Bay Area gather here. I met really cool people who worked in LinkedIn, Google, PayPal, and bunch of others. Was really grateful to see all of them, hearing their advices, and them answering all the questions. One common theme I see is how energetic and passionate people are in sharing the things they working on and just bay area life in general. A lot of food was served throughout the event and I probably munched the most calories in this dinner.
We went straight back to hotel after this and ended the day enjoying the pool in the hotel with peeps from the group. A good time to end the day sharing all we have experienced in the trip.
Day 4
Day 4!!!! Breakfast and we went straight to the Tesla Factory. Cannot really say much due to some reason ;), but the factory was sooooo big and cool to see!!
After this, we went to the google office and meet with 6 amazing SFU Alumnis. They are all so nice and were also there in the alumni reception night. We walked quite some steps and had a similar career panel with the one in Discord. Amazing Q&A Sessions and was pretty interesting to see how working is like in Google. We continued walking to the Google Pixel Store, which also sells some merch. We walked over more and getting quite some steps in.
After this is free time, we went into Twin Peaks to hike. The only time I wore shorts and it was the coldest I have ever experienced. We ‘hiked’ the peaks (quite a short walk) and ubered to eat at a restaurant at the city.
We ended the day by chilling in one of the peeps’ room.
Day 5
The final day! It was a free time before airport, so some of us decided to go to SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). I didn’t know anything but it was a worth visit. The building has 7 floors and the highlight was the 2 floors on the top. We had tour over the Art of Sounds and some cinematic experience of sounds and people singing. It was a worthwhile visit and we went back into the hotel to get our luggage. Then, we go to the airport to check-in and chill.
And… the flight was delayed for 3 or 4 times to 2 hours 40 mins-ish. I honestly don’t mind it as it means more time to enjoy with people. We wished we get delayed a bit more as compensation is only for delay with 3 hours minimum, RIP.
It was a really worthwhile trip to get to know how things work in the Bay Area and even more worthwhile to get to know the people who work there and the friends we made along the trip :D.
Takeaways
It is not a proper trip without unpacking some of the key lessons I learned from each of the office tour! Here are some of it!
Futurewei
- Focus on specializing in specific things to be irreplaceable
- Common pattern I see in people working here. Many get graduate degrees so they can know more about the domain area
- Do volunteering or working in non-profit to know what kind of work you enjoy doing
Nvidia
- Use every opportunity to learn
- Arash was a manager and he had much little time now to learn things he liked as there are many more things to look for. Your time in Uni is precious that you can go ham in learning all these things.
- Do what you love, but also choose interests in high impact and on-demand areas
- Solid advice which I resonate with. Doing what you love makes you to have a strong start so you can be quite competitive and have that initial fire in learning the skills to get the job. If this skill is high impact and on-demand, you will be rewarded and this reward will incentivize you to keep learning or basically as an indicator that you have been learning the right thing.
- Hard to predict the future, be mindful of what will come
- Sometimes we may not know whether what we will learn will be relevant or not. Arash was heavily rewarded as he is heavily expertised in GenAI before the boom and now he works at Nvidia. He got his ‘luck’ but it’s moreso his hard work and persistence that keeps him to learn and research this topic that allows him to be where he is at now.
- Rather than focus on long-term, focus on current short-term decisions
- It’s really hard to know what it will look like in the long term. But having a solid short-term decision that rewards you will give you this snowball effect that will slowly but surely reward you heavily in the long term.
- I really resonate with this advice as this is also what I applied in my routine. In my personal experience, I knew that getting a first co-op as a Software Developer was hard. Thus, what I did is to not only focus on strong projects at school, but try to get related experience (TA at Langara) and do some projects that benefits the community (Some projects at organizations). This allows me to see that getting this first co-op to be not as impossible.
- Problems change, but principles stay the same
- How to pick up good project
- How to formulate problem fundamentally
- How to manage risk and priorities
- How to communicate and manage relationships
Personal questions: Q: How to learn to be a good researcher (coming from a student who only know how to study and do good at exams)
A: First, when going into Grad school, you will have supervisor that mentor you on this. You will also learn a lot of trial and error, how to manage risk in projects, and knowing when to wrap up stuff if it is not working. This all will be repeated all over, but exploring the deep unknowns and being the frontier of knowledge advancement I guess is what makes research really interesting for some people.
Discord
- Impostor Syndrome is real. Knowing that everyone else has experienced it in their career makes you worry less and focus on what you can do
- Find passion that drives your motivation - this will lead you to places
- This will make you to be unique and make more exciting projects
- To be a good manager, care a lot and make sure people like what they are working on
- Take breaks and know that human has limitation. Burnout is real and it can make you hate things that you initially really liked
Tesla
Unfortunately for Tesla, it was only an office tour and we didn’t talk to any of the engineers. It was a good visit tho!
Google is famous for making sure the employee has a good well-being. Thus, there are food all over the office so the employee just focus on doing their best work.
- Focus on having a strong problem solving skills rather than learning a specific tech stack
- This is what Google see - though for me it can seem a bit abstract in the beginning, it makes more sense later on. As you solve more interesting problem, the tech stack matter less and recruiter see more on what impact have you done.
- Being a really good engineer is one thing, but being a person who cares about how other doings will lead you even farther
- It’s okay to fail and life is not a competition. Focus on what you can do best currently and sooner or later you will succeed.
- There was one particular engineer that really resonated to me as he got into Google quite some years after he graduated. He focused on making a lot of impact in his old company and be good at interviewing. Having this ‘fire’ to still be kept lit allowed him to be where he is at today.
Conclusion
SFU CSSS Silicon Valley Trip was definitely one of the highlight in my undergrad years at SFU. I really recommend this to people I met as this is almost like a opportunity you get once in your life to explore SV, meet with cool people with cool friends.
Feel free to ask me more about the trip if you have more questions and apologize if there’s any typo or grammar error in the blog (let me know plss). Thank you!