Like most good things in life, my internship is coming to an end -- eleven weeks that have passed by so fast that I finally couldn’t do some things that I mentioned in the previous post. I didn’t have time for the bowling game, but I leave so many friends here at Google that I’m sure I’ll come back to play with them!

To wrap up my internship I had a chance to present the outcomes of my projects three times: once to my team (and some other folks from other teams that wanted to join), once to the other marketing interns, and once to the director of my group. In all of those presentations I felt like people really cared about my job. Being an ex-consultant I can tell you this is not always the case outside Google. And that’s one of the things that I liked the most from my time here.

As I said in previous posts, you have amazing perks at Google and you work on real challenging problems, but there are other things that also make Google a unique place to work and that are harder to find at other places. Let me share with you the two that I found to be the most compelling of all.

First is how candid and open Google’s culture is. I would have never imagined that the senior management of a company with more than 30,000 employees worldwide would take the time, every single week, to talk all employees about what’s going on in the company. New products, industry news, whatever it is, every Friday afternoon senior members of the company would talk about it openly and would take any questions from Googlers in the audience and worldwide. Their answers are authentic, not cliche or pre-recorded. Listening to Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nikesh Arora, Vic Gundotra, and other top executives, standing just 10 meters from you, talk about hot new products and industry updates is unbelievable.

The second thing I want to mention is the Googlers themselves. I have worked with some of the most brilliant people I’ve met in my life and yet they were always humble and open to opinions and suggestions from someone like me, who had been in the team just for a few weeks. It is truly amazing how everybody’s opinion is not only respected but taken into serious consideration. This encourages everybody to throw ideas to the table no matter how long you’ve been with the company or how crazy the idea is. It is fantastic.

I’m sad to leave, but school starts soon. As I pack my things all I can do is thank the Googlers for an amazing summer.

Pablo

Fun Google Fact: If you like Google’s Doodles as much as I do (a lot) you might find interesting that the very first Doodle (this one) was designed as a kind of “Out-Of-Office” message. In 1998 Sergey and Larry took the weekend off to go the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The Doodle was designed to let their users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash while they were gone.

Posted by Jessica Safir, University Programs