Angie Sun- Students in Tech

Angie Sun is a senior at Michigan State University and will be joining Google this fall to work full-time as an Associate Product Manager. In our interview with Angie, she tells us about a few of her favorite projects and internships, as well as her experience with starting a YouTube channel!

Why did you chose to study computer science?

Back when I was choosing between computer science and premed; having contrast between the two really helped. Computer science is really unique in that you can make an impact almost immediately, and your work is not restricted. With a very limited set of resources, you have the ability to impact a lot of people.

In high school, I would go to China over the summer and teach in these little summer camps in a very rural, poor area. The school was in a terrible condition: there was no air conditioning, it was always 100 degrees out, there were lots of mosquitos and pretty everyone was miserable. The students were easily bored and very reluctant to learn- they would rather be playing Angry Birds on their phone. So I made games- wheel of fortune, jeopardy, it was my first time using CS outside of school. As soon as we started playing the games, the entire atmosphere of the room changed. Suddenly, there was so much energy, and I realized that because of something I programmed, someone changed their behavior for the better. That was the first time I realized that computer science is really powerful, and it’s a tool that I want to use to change the world.

Favorite class you have taken? Why?

CSE498, which I actually worked as a teaching assistant for! It’s a unique class in that it has corporate sponsors. In groups, you work on long term projects where you have a deadline to deliver a product. It’s a class that helps you grow your network, both within your school and outside- I had the opportunity to work with engineers and designers from Whirlpool!

My project was called “Launder,” and it’s for large apartment buildings or dorms that have communal laundry rooms. Our app was a way to improve the experience of doing laundry by creating an app that notifies you when washers and dryers are available and lets you pay on a centralized tablet that stays in the room.

Favorite project you have built? Most rewarding project?

YOU++, which is an Android app to categorize your smartphone’s battery drain, was the first independent project I worked on from start to finish. I was in charge of everything- marketing, user interface design, coding… when you’re doing a project outside of school, with real users in mind, it’s a different mentality. You have to take a lot of ownership; previously, I think I had only designed ugly UIs, so this was my first project that looked at least decently acceptable. It’s incredible rewarding to be able to take ownership over a product and put it on the app store; whether it gets a lot of downloads or not, you can point to it and say “I made that.”

Most challenging project or experience you have gone through?

It’d also have to be YOU++. For the professor that I was making the app for, his number one priority was to get the data. If I’d given him an app with no screen or UI but that collected data, he’d have been happy. So making a compromise between utility and something that delivered value to the user was very challenging for me.

Have you attended any hackathons? If so which ones?

Yeah, I was actually really late to the hackathon game, but I attended one last summer called Greylock, and we won a prize there! I didn’t really know my teammates before the hackathon; we’d randomly met each other the week before at Google. At the hackathon, my team was the one that drew a panda bear, a koala, basically a lot of artwork, on the windows, and we ended up building an app called Swiper, which provides location-based overlays to images.

Other resources you have used to learn computer science?

For getting in CS and coding, I think having a strong network is very important. I had an awesome high school computer science teacher, and starting in freshman year of high school, I was very involved; he and I cofounded our high school’s girls’ computer science course and we had a really great student-teacher relationship. I think that strong relationship with him was one of the main reasons for wanting to continue in computer science. Keeping up the energy and making it sustainable requires some sort of social connection, not just you on your own. So for getting started, I think making computer science friends is actually the most important part.

Instead of pointing to any specific online resources, I’d say that I learned the most from pursuing personal projects. Learning things from the Internet ties into that, but this is learning things from the Internet for a specific purpose, as in you already have an end goal in mind, and you’re learning something online to reach that end goal. For me, if I were to say, learn about artificial intelligence without knowing what I would do with it after, I tend to forget things and lose motivation more easily.

What internships/research opportunities have you had?

I’ve worked at Google twice, once as an Engineering Practicum intern and once as an Associate Product Manager intern. Outside of that, I’ve worked at a small company called Hydrate, Hydrate makes smart water bottles, and I was the product owner on that team, I worked with them very briefly, it was a 30 day internship, if anything, it was more like a sprint.

One thing that I learned from my product experience this summer is that product managers have to make a ton of decisions every day. I think sometimes it’s easy to get lost in that and think “I’m the expert.” Over the summer, there was one decision I made that I think I made rather hastily, just because I was so used to making decisions, and I think that as a product manager, you should take the time to weigh decisions that is proportional to how long your team will have to spend making up for it if you made the wrong decision.

Resources you used to get those internships?

For me, getting my APM internship, I think it was about putting in the 10,000 hours. I spent a ton of time googling interview questions and practicing them with my friends. You really have to be good at something to do well in the interview, so I’d advise getting good at the interview and spending time to make yourself someone who can add value, whether in the interview, or on the job.

I probably read at least 20 books and went through hundreds and hundreds of websites, so I can’t say that there’s any one that’s my favorite.

What would you like to do after school?

I like to drink bubble tea, and I like to constantly refresh my YouTube page to see whether it’s grown or not!

Tell me a bit about your experience with starting a YouTube channel. Has that influenced how you approach computer science or tech?

For me, building an app or building a website is easier than making one YouTube video. I think that it’s because it’s something that I’m unfamiliar with, and it’s very public if you fail with it, so there’s a lot of pressure. Learning to broaden my scope, and do something more public, and can hopefully something that can impact a lot of people, has been really rewarding and I definitely hope to continue.

When you work at a company like Google, they already built an audience of billions of people who are impacted by your work. I have to slowly grow my YouTube channel piece by piece, and the advantage of that is that I learn to appreciate the scale of things. Each person who comments on my video provides a personal touch; I get to learn what they’re thinking and hear what they’re learning from me. Who are those people? What are they thinking? And what can we do to get to know them better? As a computer scientist, I think those are important questions to keep in mind.

Advice for students interesting studying CS or pursuing projects?

I’d say putting in your 10,000 hours. After I put up my YouTube channel, a lot of people have been asking me, “what did you put on your resume, or do you have any interview tips?” While I think those are good questions, I don’t think something you put on your resume or say in your interview can make up for quality of character and quality of work, and those are really long-term. So I think that putting in the 10,000 hours to build projects and improve yourself as a person, and then learning how to use your skills to improve the world is a lot more valuable than anything you could do to get into a certain class, or get into a certain internship.