I orig­i­nally signed up for the Princetern­ship pro­gram because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had done a lot of biology/medical things in high school, but then got to Prince­ton and real­ized there were so many more options here. The Princetern­ship gave me a pre­view of where the engi­neer­ing track would take me after grad­u­a­tion. I was not even nec­es­sar­ily inter­ested in a par­tic­u­lar career at this point, I just wanted a sense of the industry.

I got really lucky to have Hal as my Alum­nus. Erica (another first year) and I, found that Hal went out of his way to make our expe­ri­ence a good one. We met him in a New York cof­fee shop, where he explained what he does and where he thinks Juniper and the high-tech indus­try are headed. We got a rudi­men­tary intro­duc­tion to net­work­ing and a fun­da­men­tal edu­ca­tion on the com­pany we were going to be shad­ow­ing and meet­ing peo­ple from all day.

Hal Stern, fel­low Princetern Erica, and Guillaume

We next went to the New York office of Juniper Net­works (Hal nor­mally works at the one in Bridge­wa­ter). After look­ing around the office for a while and chat­ting with some of his co-workers, we went to another meet­ing Hal had arranged – with Gianni Mar­tire, co-founder of Hotlist.com. We talked over lunch, which we were treated to! Every­one who spoke with us was really out­go­ing and help­ful. At the end of our expe­ri­ence, we con­nected with won­der­ful alumni who will likely serve as men­tors in the future!