Week One

I’m just about finished with the first week of my internship at Pixar. The group of interns they’ve collected is amazing. Everyone is so good at what they do—it’s really intimidating.

We’ve done mainly training this first week. We’ve been told to be a little bit hush-hush about pretty much everything we do here. Quite different from the academic world but Pixar has its secret sauce that it has to protect. I really don’t think it’s the training or the software or any of that. Well, no one thinks it is. Pretty much everyone realizes that it’s the people at Pixar that make it the place that it is.

One of the cool things I’ve done this week is interact with artists. It’s a pretty interesting exchange—programmers really respect the work of artists and artists really respect the work of programmers. But this goes out even further. I had no idea what kind of curriculum you would have at an art school. And the artists I were surprised at the curriculum I went through as a CS major. It’s a healthy mix of respect and amazement. Kind of like meeting Donald Knuth. Then taking a picture with him during graduation. Kind of.