California – May 20-23, 2004
I was invited to pay a visit to the Google campus located in Mountain View, California. It is an amazing campus with beautiful amenities and a fun and colorful working environment. I was fascinated by all the colorful balls that were rolling around in the corridors of the office. The people seemed very happy to be there and were treated really well. I had the opportunity to meet the co-founder of Google, Larry Page and also the Vice President, Alan Eustace. Someone asked Larry a question as to why Google’s page is so empty compared to the other search engines. At that point he answered that “we were lazy and wanted to do the least amount of work.”
On the morning of May 21, all the women finalists for the Anita Borg Google scholarship gathered in the hotel lobby. There were 95 applicants who had applied for this scholarship from 67 colleges and universities. 19 finalists were chosen out of that group. It felt so weird to be around all women engineers. This was my first such experience and was actually amazing. We chatted for about 30 minutes. Then the limousine took us to the Google campus for an all day event. In the main lobby of Google, there is a big screen that dynamically displays the search texts that people around the world are searching for. That was so cool!
The day started with a light breakfast and then we had opening remarks from the Vice President of Engineering and Research at Google. His name is Alan Eustace. He is a very driven and generous man. Later on, Jen Fitzpatrick, who is the director of engineering, gave a talk on career paths in Computer Science. She listed 7 important things a student should focus on before getting out of school. I found her advice really valuable. Sharon Perl and Ellen Spertus also gave a talk on industry vs. academia. Ellen used to think women are stupid because they are not interested in Math and technology. It was not until she took a class called ‘Gender in Computer Science’ that she changed her viewpoint. Sharon Perl had an inspiring story to share with us as well. She had applied to MIT and Stanford for graduate school and did not get in there. So she decided to work with people at MIT or Stanford with a hope that when she applies to graduate school next year she would have a strong recommendation letter from them. It turned out quite well for her as she got a programming job at MIT and after working there for a year, got admission in the MIT -MS/Ph.D program. Later that afternoon some employees from Google joined us for discussions. Those people were referred to as .googlers.” They shared some of their experiences at Google. Then several other people came and gave brief demos on Gmail, Froogle and the Google Tool Bar. There was a speaker named Niniang Wang who completed her high school at the age of 14 and college at 18. At the age of 5 she wrote screen savers and when she was 10 she learnt Lisp. I thought that was really impressive.
The Anita Borg Scholarship was in honor of Dr. Anita Borg who died in 2003 from cancer. The CEO and president of Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (IWT) also came and showed us the video of some amazing scenes from Anita Borg’s life and the drive and passion she had to make a difference in the way technology works and to change the culture of engineering by encouraging women engineers. At 4 pm that day the results were announced and I was taken aback when my name was announced as the winner of the scholarship. It was definitely one of those moments where I had goose bumps and really wished my family, friends and mentor was there to see that event. Then we went to TGIF (Thank Goodness It’s Friday), which is an event that is held every Friday at 4:30 pm at Google to mingle with people and announce any updates or current news. We were then taken back to our hotel rooms for a 15 minute break. At 6 pm we all got together to go for dinner at The California Cafe in Palo Alto, which was amazing. It was an extensive 2.5 hours dinner where we all talked to the Googlers and to all the scholars. By this point I had not slept for over 50 hours. One of the things my advisor taught me is to take down notes as soon as you can because otherwise you loose some of the most important details. So I wrote this before going to bed.
Google is hiring many interns this year. They increased their number to 90 compared to 30 last year. Their selection criteria are GPA, letters of recommendation, projects/internships and coding experience.
On Saturday, Google had planned day out to San Francisco for the girls. We got in the bus at 9 am after a quick breakfast and headed off to the Bay area. We took a cruise around the Bay area. It was a 2 hour cruise where they served amazing brunch and desserts. We spent most of the time on the deck of the ship taking pictures of all the wonderful places on the way like the Alcatraz, Golden Gate and many more. This was a wonderful time to bond with the girls who were on board and we got to know each other really well. Later on, we went to Pier 39, a common tourist attraction. There I saw a bunch of smelly sea lions climbing on top of each other. It is really fun to watch them, as they act goofy and crazy all the time. Then we went to the ‘Trains’ concert. I had never heard of them before. We got some local Margaritas and hung out around the Bay area for the rest of the afternoon. Towards the evening, we all were tired and hungry so we took a shuttle to Palo Alto and went to a Thai restaurant. There were some women in the group who had never had Thai food before so we got them to try some. After dinner we took another bus back to our hotel and hung out by the pool for the rest of the evening chatting and laughing. Our discussions ranged from the best software to use, research, professors to boys. We established such wonderful friendships that we all plan to meet once every year now. It was amazing to be around such smart women in computer science.