Sharing Talent, Technology, Time

For the third year in a row, Sun will be hosting students from the Rutgers University Governor's School of Technology and Engineering Program.  These ambitious students will visit the Sun New York office and spend the day attending short sessions on Sun Technology, Sun Projects, Career Development, and more.  The day will be July 15.

Sun is opening up it's office and sharing the talents of its employees.  If you are a Sun employee in NYC and want to volunteer for the event, drop me a line at Julie.Smith@sun.com.  Volunteers are needed to serve as Team Captains to guide student teams, comprised of approximately 10 students, between the sessions and daily activities. Photographers, videographers and video editors are also needed.

On July 18, members of Sun microsystems' NJ/NY Black Employee Network (BEN) hosted their second site visit from the NJ Governor's School of Engineering and Technology Program in the Somerset, New Jersey office. The program is focused on the fields of engineering, information technology and technology, and works with high school students that are generally in the top 2% of their class.

Approximately 30 Sun volunteers came together to host this interactive day of learning for 90 students.  Students had the unique opportunity to hear from various Sun employees on issues ranging from StarOffice, Network.com, Eco-Repsonsibility, and future career paths available to the students.

At the end of the day, the students were each challenged to enter a Network.com contest in which participants were to provide an automated solution to a problem that runs on the Sun Grid Compute Utility. Submissions were due by August 31, at which time the judges ran each submission, and the finalists to solve the problem with the least amount of CPU-time and the least amount of wall-clock time won an 80GB ipod.

Sun Microsystems thanks all participants for their submissions, and is excited to announce the winners of the “Network.Com Contest for 2007 Governor's School of Engineering & Technology Program” contest. 

Five of the total submissions computed the correct result in approximately the same amount of time, earning a five-way tie for “Category A: A valid solution computed with the least amount of CPU time consumed”.

The five first place winners are (in alphabetical order by last name):

• Christopher Camastra

• Phillip DiSanto

• Anthony Hsu

• Anthony Leontiev

• David Vetrano

Congratulations to all the winners!

In case you've missed it, an article has been featured on the front page of Sun.com about Global Citizenship's Project Open Doors! Click here to view it.   We are so proud and grateful to all the volunteers who make these events happen. 

Keep your eyes open, because we will soon be releasing a template with simple instructions so that you can plan a Project Open Doors at your campus.

There are so many groups doing great things at Sun, another great source to learn more about the digital divide is the Education group's Learning Curve Blog 

As I moved from table to table at our lunch time event during Project Open Doors in Menlo Park, I couldn't help but think of Kermit the Frog singing " Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection - the lovers, the dreamers and me"

...At the risk of comparing myself to Kermit, my version of the song was slightly different and went something like "Sun has found it, the intern connection - the marketers, the techies, and more" (I know it doesn't rhyme as well...but we all can't be as cool as Kermit)

We hosted a wonderful group of students from the Coro Exploring Leadership program.  They had a full day of events and were given the opportunity to meet in small groups with the employees and executives from across the company, and lunch was no exception. 

I was able to organize about 15 interns to meet with the visiting students during lunch.  About every 4 students were paired with an intern and had the chance to ask a range of question from what working at sun as an intern is like, to what college is like.  At the end of the 1 hour, both the students and the interns walked away feeling like they had learned something new.  At the end of the day the Coro students filled out their evaluations about what they thought about their day, and by far the activity they most enjoyed was meeting the interns! 

Way to go MPK interns.  It isn't often that we find a job that we can feel we are really making a difference in others lives, especially as an intern.  So it was a win-win situation, and I can't wait to do it again!

Here are some pictures that captured the "intern connection" (Can you guess who the interns are?)