Allen is a freshman and a prospective CSS major. He joined an exchange program to Germany for ten months and he wants to visit there again. In school, he teaches for Lets Get Ready's college prep program.
We went to Google’s Mountain View campus at noon and met Oren Finard 13’ and Miriam Lester 16’. Oren joined Google immediately after he finished the 3+2 Program between Wes and Columbia; Miriam finished an M.A degree of Computer Science at Wes in 2017 and now works at the YouTube content management team.
Oren and Miriam toured us Google’s visitor center and Merchandise Center, and we had lunch together at Charlie’s Café. During the two hours we were meeting, we learned a lot about how these two recent Wes graduates finished their computer science major and found their jobs at Google, and also about Google’s supportive and amazing work environment. A memorable takeaway of mine from today’s conversation is that communication and collaboration with fellow workers are just as important as programming hard-skills in Google.
Both Oren and Miriam mentioned how people in Google benefits from learning from one another and cultivating specific knowledge after they actually start working on a project. Learning to deal with different people and developing self-teaching ability are two things they talk about that Wes education really helped a lot with. An impressive feature of Google is the conference held every Thursday at Charlie’s Café, when employees are presented with opportunities to openly present and discuss projects they are working on. It is extremely valuable, quote one of our alums, to keep this startup-like close collaboration between departments within this industry giant.