My first day at Qualcomm

I had written this abt a year back but forgot to publish it.. Here it goes :P

I started my summer internship at Qualcomm on May 11th 2009. Qualcomm is a huge tech company which makes CDMA chipsets for many years. It is now venturing into many new businesses as all, but CDMA chipsets are still the main selling product. I had read text-books written my Qualcomm's founders Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi in IIT. So, I was really excited about working in their company.

Our first day was supposed to be devoted completely to a new employee orientation programme. First, there was a delicious breakfast in the main building N. Then they took us into the superb building N auditorium where we had an introductory speech and video about Qualcomm. I liked Qualcomm's 3 corporate values - Innovate, Execute, Partner. They are capture so succinctly what an ideal tech company like Qualcomm must aim at. This is the most striking thing I found about Qualcomm. Their aims are very direct and practical. It is surprising to see that people who work here - be it a new employee or a senior executive - all of them love their job. One does not find this in other companies.

After the introductory speech, we were taken on a bus tour to Qualcomm buildings. Since San Diego is Qualcomm HQ, they have some 20-30 buildings there. One very interesting building was the Media FLO centre. It is the place from where Qualcomm's new venture - FLO TV- (live TV on mobile) is broadcasted. There was a huuuuuge screen (must be 30m wide) which showed pictures of channels being broadcasted in every place in the US.

The next day we had a lecture session over breakfast in which some of Corporate R&D's top executives introduced us to the latest research developments. Later, we were assigned the specific projects we had to work on and we met our project mentors. The inital timepass got over and work began :).