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Introduction (in English)

I was born in Beijing, China and spent my first eighteen years in Beijing. The thing I miss most about Beijing are my family and friends, and then the traditional Beijing food (two of my favorites are shown in the pictures). I'm proud of being raised in the Chinese culture and possessing my Chinese language skills. I miss my family and friends in Beijing a lot. They are all great people who supported me coming across many obstacles in my life. I go back to Beijing every summer except last summer when I attended Mayball at Cambridge, and this summer when I interned at Microsoft. I miss my hometown. I'm also happy that I came here to America and became an MIT student. Here at MIT, I get to hang out with smart and interesting people.

I worked at Microsft this summer and NVIDIA for the past two summers in California. Living in Sillicon Valley was amazing. I love the place, not just because palm trees are beautiful, but also there are a great deal of intelligent people who I want to hang out with. I was working on developing APIs and test scripts for MS this year at Microsoft. At NVIDIA I was working on power saving verification in the GPU notebook group for the first summer, and doing bringup for the second summer. I gained lots of hardware and software experience, Verilog, Linux, C++, C#, etc. We, about 40 MIT interns who were working in the bay-area, tried to explore California every weekend. We went to LA, San Fransisco, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Big Basin... All good stuff. Here are some pictures from the first summer.

I studied at the University of Cambridge, England doing the Engineering Tripos Part IIA in my Junior year through CME (Cambridge MIT exchange). The decision of spending one quarter of my university time abroad was tough, because I was not sure whether I wanted such a dramatic change of environment. However, I was pretty far ahead academically, and really eager to see the world. Besides, I was put in Trinity College, the biggest and richest college at Cambridge. The Cambridge education is a lot more theoretical versus the MIT education, being more applicable. I see this as an advantage for me, because I got the best of both sides. The year at Cambridge gave me a real chance to travel around Europe. I went to Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Czech Republic. Seeing how other people in the world live their lives made me ponder about my life. It taught me a lot of things that I couldn't learn from books. To see where I've lived in, where I've been to, and where I want to go to, click here.

For the first time in my life, I saw how British people live their lives. It's actually pretty different from what I saw in romantic comedies with Hugh Grant in them, such as Love Actually, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral... I can't say much about the whole of England, but Cambridge's streets are quite narrow and crowded, houses are small and usually under-heated in the winter to save energy. London is really crowded and very expensive. You have to rely on public transportation in London, though it's an exciting city regardless.

Now I'm back at MIT, enjoying the fire-hose experience. I'm doing a one year Masters of Engineering this year on Computer Architecture. I'm really excited about it!

Last updated: April 19, 2009

Tina Wen (tinaw at mit dot edu)