Summer Programming Experiences, Summer 2010, Princeton University

A Princeton University Computer Science Internship

Welcome to the SPE 2010 website! Princeton University’s SPE, or Summer Programming Experience, is a month-long summer internship for Princeton underclassmen, offering them the opportunity to work on a substantive coding project of their own devise. Either working individually or in pairs, nine students pursued topics including 3D graphics, battlefield game-play, interactive campus maps, algorithmic logo-makers, photographic mosaics, and twitter-desktop synchronization.

What we took out of this program was much more than the programs you see you before you; for us, this was an excursion into unfamiliar territory, an opportunity to see what happens when creativity and coding are coalesced at a relatively whiplash pace. We tinkered with unfamiliar API’s. We painstakingly crafted GUI’s ex nihilo. And we finished it all with JAR’s and JNLP’s (and, as you can see, became accustomed to quite a few acronyms along the way.) But by crafting programs at such a large scale, we also earned a stronger familiarity with coding and collaboration, the benefits of research, and the importance of design — skills that will surely help us in both our time in Princeton and in the career paths we pursue.

Our work, however, was not the centerfold of this experience —

there was certainly time for a little summer excitement. Weekly trips for ice-cream, SPE renditions of ultimate frisbee (possibly involving flying mousepads,) and many, many fruit snacks were also defining aspects of SPE. We would like to give a SPEcial thanks to Kevin Wayne for his wisdom and pedagogical prowess, our graduate-student mentors for volunteering their valuable, much-appreciated time, the COS 226 Course Development students Jeffery Hodes and Gabriel Cadamuro, and to each and every benefactor that makes this program possible.

Take a look at what we’ve made, and enjoy!

Zach Bintliff && Jeffrey Snyder

John O’Neill

Esther Kim && Kathleen Liu

Yingxue Li

Gabrielle Chen

Megan Skalbeck && Chester Kwak