Many students come to Stanford hoping to score a coveted internship or job with key tech companies like Facebook, Google or Microsoft. But that’s not a problem for David Liu ’14.
Last summer, before starting his freshmen year at Stanford, Liu scored an internship at Facebook and revamped the notification system to keep users from being flooded with several notifications for each separate wall post.
“Notification overload was a common problem and they’d been talking about fixing it for five years or so,” David said. “A previous intern had tried to aggregate notifications, but didn’t finish the project because it became unwieldy. I started anew and finished it.”
So how exactly does an intern with just a high school diploma under his belt manage to single-handedly fix a problem Facebook has been struggling with for years?
“I studied the existing system and heavily modified the structure of the notifications system” David said. “Of course, I talked a lot with other engineers to bounce ideas around. It was a lot more complicated of a task than you’d first think: for example, one of the trickiest parts of the problem was coming up with a design that would allow people to translate the notifications to the hundred or so languages that Facebook supports.”
Still, all the hard work paid off, and David’s system launched successfully last summer.
“Launching the changes was the coolest part of the job; the feeling of slipping a switch for 500 million users is powerful.”
With this accomplishment under his belt, David found himself to be a coveted intern for several Silicon Valley companies this summer.
“My winter quarter this year was filled with interviewing,” he tells me. After interviewing with the likes of Google, Amazon and Dropbox, David found himself with 10 internship offers for the summer. The lucky company? Palantir.
“My Palantir interview was a unique experience,” David said. “They had a full-day visit which was grueling, but actually ended up being quite fun! After the endless panels of technical questions, I ended up playing ‘Angry Birds IRL’ with them: throwing stuffed birds at stuffed pigs and stacked furniture on the other side of the room.”
This combination of cutting-edge work coupled with a playful attitude won David over, who between CS classes and work on the start-up Locra (a hub for community service activity) has found time to explore digital photography, rock-climbing, wind-surfing and social dance. He also has a few side projects – a word game called Anagram Thief (you can find it at anagramthief.com) and FINALE, a tetris-like game.
This crazy schedule is all in a day’s work for David, who plans to start his own business in the future. His successful career so far is proof that even as a teenager, it’s possible to achieve incredible work.