Summer 2017 Updates & Internship at IBM Research

Hey guys!

Wow, I haven’t made a blog post in so long, as it’s been more than a year since my last one!

So, my sophomore year at Harvard ended. It went by pretty fast, between classes and activities, and now I only have two years left at this amazing institution. Just before I departed for New York for my internship, we had the chance to get out of our Harvard bubble and tour some of the beautiful parks in Boston

Since May 15th, I have been working as a research intern at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson’s Research Center, which is this beautiful place:

Here, I’m researching in IBM’s Cloud Foundation Services as the only undergraduate student in our team (all of the other interns are PhD students), and specificially on IBM Watson’s Bluemix Cloud Platform where I work with FUSE filesystems and crawlers to improve the speed and efficiency of vulnerability advisors on cloud machines.

This is my first real experience into the world of research, and possibly a pivoting point into the world of PhDs and academia. So far, I really like the research culture and can see myself researching in the world of computer science for the foreseable future. I really like what I’m doing, and when I combine this research with my great mentor and manager, I feel as if I’ve struck gold.

In addition, I really like some of the perks IBM provides for its research interns. They put us in hotels for the entire duration of our stay, and so far I’m enjoying the daily room service and amenities the Hyatt Place provides. The walls are unfortunately a bit thin, but it’s only a minor issue. We also have daily shuttles that take us back and forth work, and these shuttles are not the shuttles we expected:

One of the factors that I took into account while deciding where to intern was the amount of time I would get to just relax. What do I mean by this? Well, in the world of CS, it’s really easy to find yourself sitting behind a screen for hours without ever seeing a single ray of sunlight, and I was trying to maximize my time outside. Thankfully, here at IBM Watson, I can move my “office” outside and enjoy the beatiful greenery of Westchester County, NY:

The weekends are our time to chill, so during these days we explore all parts and boroughs of New York City. I used to think that NYC was just an amalgam of concrete blocks where over seven million people lived, but apparently that’s not the case. From the multitute of things to do in NYC, to the abundance of natural parks (Central Park <3), I saw that NYC is truly a great city. If only more cities in Turkey can be like this, where people understand that you can;t just put buildings everywhere and that you also have to preserve the parks that are in a city. Of course, most cities in Turkey aren’t situated where NYC is, which allows for amazing sceneries:

Lastly, the food in this city is great. I am now a “devout eater” of New York City pizza, one that is thin and made up of only three main ingredients: flour, sauce, and cheese. Soo good… Hopefully after Ramadan I’ll be able to better enjoy the food this city offers!

Until next time!