Speak Up
July 26, 2014
Halfway done! This was such a fun week. There was pretty much an event every night this week. I enjoyed the awesome talks, meeting up with friends, and most of all the free swag!
On Tuesday, I went to Internapalooza with Rita, Fiona, and Mitch! I saw a lot of my friends and met a few new ones like Erik. Silicon Valley is a really small community; whenever I meet someone, I find out they have like 10 mutual friends! It’s cool that everyone I meet here is a friend of a friend. Internapalooza received a lot of hype because of all the guest speakers like Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal. They spoke about their careers and gave us advice about being 20-year-olds in the tech industry.
On Wednesday, Mitch and I took on Twitter. Too bad it was mostly, no it was all engineer driven. Wish there were just a couple designers there! ☹ It was okay though since I spoke with a couple product managers and it was nice to see the Twitter office for the first time. We didn’t stay very long.
We met with Thomas over at Pinterest. Wow, I loved Pinterest, it was probably my favorite event so far! It was awesome to see my recruiter, Kate, again! I missed this place! As soon as I walked in, I spotted the legendary Ben Silbermann. I had to talk to him. Mitch, Thomas, and I walked over to him and he was speaking with the new Head of Engineering at Pinterest, Michael Lopp. Ben Silbermann was so nice! He loved speaking with us and when I told him I was a design intern at Google, he walked me across the room to meet… Evan Sharp! I was literally in heaven when I was speaking with both of them. I could definitely learn a lot from Evan since he was a well-known designer-founder!
Pinterest also had so many awesome little stations of DIY things. There was a photobooth and a lot of ice cream and alcohol. hahaha There was a talk and it wasn’t so long that I got bored. There wasn’t really design specific things but Evan Sharp spoke with me for a while and gave me great advice. He also pointed out a couple of designers who were there that I should speak with. Definitely felt the love as a designer that I didn’t get at Twitter! haha It was overall a great event and I would definitely go again!
Thursday was Facebook’s turn! The Facebook Summer Fest Carnival was on Thursday but before that was a design panel by the highly admired Tom Hobbs, Maria Giudice, Robyn Morris, Julie Zhuo, and Drew Hamlin! They gave advice about being young designers and also what design is like at Facebook. It was a great panel and I’m so glad I was able to go.
The carnival was a ton of fun! So much to do! There were obstacle courses, jumpy houses, climbing things, and so much things I’ve never seen before actually. A ton of Facebook employees were all over the place. There was really good food trucks. Okay, this was my favorite event so far. It was so fun. Lucas gave the Google design interns a tour. I love Facebook and I love the campus and I love the people. Good job Facebook!
Oh yeah this week I also met with some of my Google heroes. I ate lunch with THE Isabelle Olsson. She’s the lead designer of Google Glass. She specializes and industrial design so she’s the first industrial designer I’ve had a 1:1 with. It was great to hear her thoughts on agency vs. big tech company. She wanted me to keep in contact with her if I was ever interested in working on Glass. :3 I also had lunch with Jason Cornwell, the head of design for Gmail and Calendar. I’ve admired him for so long. We ate lunch at Building 44 and he talked to me about how he wanted to work on Gmail when he was younger and now he leads the team! We didn’t just have lunch! He invited me to check out the Gmail workspace and meet some people on his team. They’re all awesome people. He also let me sit in and watch some usability studies on new stuff they’re working on at Gmail! So exciting! ☺
This was a great week. It’s shown me that you can’t just sit around hoping for something to happen. Go out and meet people. Speak up! Jason said that I was the only intern to reach out to him and that’s already put me miles ahead of the others. Why? Why aren’t the other interns meeting people here at Google? Why aren’t they attending these events? Take advantage of your time here in the Bay Area. Where and when else are you going to be surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world? Don’t just think it’s all good now just because you’re here. Keep working hard and be even greater. I’m so glad these companies have these events. I wish I could work at every company. They all are so cool in their own ways. I’m excited for next week. LinkedIn is the only thing scheduled but I’m sure there will be more popping up out of nowhere. Can’t wait to make the most out of these last few 6 weeks. ☺
