My day as a Princetern started off with a train ride to New York City and a short walk over to Google’s New York head­quar­ters. There, I met my alumni host, Raj Hathi­ra­mani, a 2007 Prince­ton graduate.I was imme­di­ately taken with the envi­ron­ment at Google. Despite all of the work that I knew to be going on there, Google was relaxed and wel­com­ing. A few hours into my day, it stopped being odd see­ing employ­ees whizzing down the hall­ways on Google scoot­ers, or peo­ple get­ting from one floor to another by climb­ing a lad­der or slid­ing down a fire pole. Dress was quite casual, which fur­ther con­tributed to the relaxed atmosphere.

My alumni host took me on a tour of the build­ing, show­ing me where employ­ees in dif­fer­ent divi­sions of Google worked, and other cool areas of his work place, includ­ing the game room, nap loca­tions, a vir­tual library, and mas­sage rooms. I also noticed that the very open envi­ron­ment at Google was reflected in the design of the work place. There were very few closed doors, actu­ally very few doors in gen­eral, in the work­space. Employ­ees worked in groups, where every group mem­ber was in the same loca­tion, and worked in adjoin­ing spaces, in order to fos­ter a col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment. It also seemed like Google really val­ued its employ­ees and took great care to ensure that all of their needs were taken care of, so that all they had to do was be cre­ative, inno­v­a­tive, and get work done. From my dis­cus­sions with my alumni host, and other Googlers, I learned how true this was.

Raj and I then had a con­ver­sa­tion about what exactly he does at Google. Raj works as an ana­lyst in dis­play adver­tis­ing. Basi­cally, he helps enable opti­mal sell­ing of dis­play ads that you see on Google search engines and Google owned pages. He explained a sys­tem called Google AdWords, which offers ad spaces to busi­nesses and cor­po­ra­tions. As an ana­lyst, Raj also works to model rev­enue from new prod­ucts and allo­cate resources based on prof­itabil­ity met­rics to pri­or­i­tize strate­gic invest­ments. He works closely with the prod­uct and engi­neer­ing teams as well on effi­cient data infra­struc­ture in order to max­i­mize gains for both Google and its cus­tomers. Besides telling me about his main work and answer­ing any and all ques­tions I had, Raj also told me about Google’s “20-percent-time.” Google allows, no encour­ages, its engi­neers to spend 20% of their time at work on any project or idea they are pas­sion­ate about, that is in any way related to Google. As a Prince­ton Alum, Raj had con­sid­ered the idea of bring­ing lan­guage tables to Google, since there were many Googlers who wanted to learn new lan­guages, and plenty of lan­guages are rep­re­sented in this work­place. Raj also spoke to me about his time at Prince­ton, and com­pared the envi­ron­ment at Google to that of Prince­ton, say­ing that every­thing that you need to thrive at both loca­tions is given to you. Sur­pris­ingly I learned that not only did Raj and I live in the same res­i­den­tial col­lege, I also am cur­rently liv­ing in the same room he lived in when he was an RCA!

After describ­ing more about his job, Raj took me to meet four other Googlers who worked on dis­play enter­tain­ment sales,invite media sales, as a Google Docs engi­neer, and on google.org (the branch of Google that is for non­prof­its and works with cri­sis response and dis­as­ter aid). Through my dis­cus­sions with each one of them, I noticed com­mon themes of cre­ativ­ity, team based work, and a sat­is­fac­tion with the work they were doing. They all had lives out­side of Google, and noted that work at Google fits with their lives, and doesn’t take it over. Mike, the Google Docs engi­neer, told me that many employ­ees set their own work times, some­times choos­ing to work from home on some days. One thing Mike said that really stood out to me was that, even though Google is this huge busi­ness, to him, it still felt like a small company.

Seyi and fel­low Princetern Trap

As a fresh­man, I came into this Princetern­ship hop­ing to just gain some insight into a career field I could pos­si­bly see myself pur­su­ing. I was so grate­ful that Raj, my host, took me to meet with Googlers in other fields so I could get a sense of some of the other capac­i­ties in which one can work at Google. My expe­ri­ence at Google, and what I learned from speak­ing with some of the employ­ees there, is actu­ally caus­ing me to con­sider a major change, as I saw a field I can truly see myself work­ing in. Google is an awe­some place, and I strongly encour­age other stu­dents to con­sider going on this Princetern­ship. It was an eye-opening expe­ri­ence for me and can give you knowl­edge about a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent career paths. I am truly thank­ful to Raj for tak­ing the time out of his busy work sched­ule to give me this won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity, and to all of the amaz­ing peo­ple I met and spoke with dur­ing my Princeternship.