We've moved! Visit
The Keyword
for all the latest stories about
life at Google
and our
student programs
.
Student Blog
Brought to you from your @GoogleStudents friends. From pre-university to PhD (and beyond), we got you.
Announcing the winners of the Google Online Marketing Challenge 2010
July 23, 2010
This year we held the third edition of the
Google Online Marketing Challenge
– a global university competition that gives students hands-on exposure to online marketing. Each team receives the equivalent of $200 to work with a local company and create an online marketing campaign. Teams have three weeks to mastermind a strategy before submitting a campaign report to an international judging panel of professors.
We're delighted that 3,034 teams from 60 countries participated in the 2010 Challenge, representing a 39% increase from last year, and making the Challenge one of the world's largest university competitions.
The global winners of the Challenge are Lauren Williams, Ganesh Chaudhar, Jeeana Atmarow, Allison Miller, Mohammed Assiri and Hui Min Chua from the University of Western Australia, who promoted the kids’ novel
The Adventures of Charlie & Moon
. Over the three week campaign, the novel’s website saw a huge jump in visits—nearly 800 percent. The team will visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, California and each of the members will receive a laptop for their great performance in the Challenge.
We also had three regional winners: for the Americas, the winning team comes from
Carnegie Mellon University
in the U.S. and a team from the
Warsaw School of Economics
in Poland won in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). In the Asia Pacific region, the winners come from the
Edith Cowan University
in Perth, Australia. You can find
more details about our winners here
.
Since we first held it in 2008, the Google Online Marketing Challenge has grown each year, allowing thousands of students globally to learn about online advertising and help small businesses to improve their online presence. The education they’ve already received becomes real in the Challenge: real money, real campaigns, real businesses and real results. And the hands-on experience with online marketing gives them real skills they can use in their careers.
If you’re interested in competing in the 2011 Challenge,
register now
. We’ll open the sign-up period in the fall.
Posted by Alex Gibelalde, Product Marketing Manager
2010 EMEA Scholars' Retreat - top CS students share their impressions
July 22, 2010
(cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
Back in June, our Zurich engineering headquarters welcomed 100 of EMEA’s brightest computer science students to our annual Europe, Middle East and Africa Scholars’ Retreat. Recipients of the
Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities
joined
Anita Borg Memorial Scholars and Finalists
for three days of workshops, technical talks, poster sessions, networking events and, of course, lots of fun! Check out our video below to hear from scholars and speakers in their own words:
Our academic scholarships are designed to support a new generation of talented, diverse computer scientists from all backgrounds. If you want to learn more, visit
www.google.com/university/emea
for a complete list of scholarships, grants and other opportunities available to students and academics.
Posted by Caitlin Pantos, University Programs Specialist
Diary of a Summer Intern
July 21, 2010
Hello Everyone,
This week was pretty crazy. we’ve been having a hackathon, which is basically an event where our whole team meets in one city to try and quickly fix the bugs we have on file.. It has included doughnuts, cupcakes, pierogi, and an offsite team building event with dinner. As we are all in one room, we are able to work together and ask each other questions. On our breaks, we have been playing pool and foosball. At one point, we had a power outage. That was interesting to say the least, but it was quickly remedied. Luckily, because everything is stored in the cloud, we did not lose anything we had been working on, and were quickly able to resume our progress.
Since the start of my project, we have changed the implementation multiple times, which has halted my ability to get the patch turned in. However, it has been good, because each time we have come up with a better way to sync. Unfortunately, this means that the tests have to be re-written every time as well, in addition to changing the design document I've been working on. For this reason, it will be really nice when it is all figured out and tested. Deleting code is the worst, especially when you reflect on how much time you spent on the code you are now deleting. But, the end product is always a little sweeter, because you know that it is exactly how you want it to be.
From my viewpoint now, I do not know if I will actually finish my project this summer. But, I have learned so much in the process, that finishing would only be icing on the cake.
That's about all I have for now.
Hope you all are having a good summer,
Jerr
Random Google Fact: They have massage chairs randomly placed around the office. So if you get a little frustrated coding, all you have to do is take a walk down the hall and sit and relax in one of the chairs.
Diary of a Summer Intern
July 19, 2010
Hey everyone,
I can’t believe that it is already July and that it is time to update you all again! I am almost at the midpoint of my internship, and my summer projects and responsibilities are really starting to ramp up. I am currently juggling about 5 core assignments for my team. I am extremely grateful to be given the opportunity to make an impact on the YouTube community through these projects.
Many people have been asking me how my experiences as an intern this year compare to my experiences last year. Last year I had one, very large project that took me the entire summer to complete. I worked on a team within AdSense, one of Google’s largest and oldest advertising products. My project within AdSense was research-based, and I had the opportunity to speak with Googlers working on AdSense in Brazil, China, Japan, Argentina, Canada, and Dublin. As an international business major, last year’s project was certainly a dream come true!
In contrast, this summer I am finding myself learning how to juggle multiple projects at once. I worked on a team within AdSense, one of Google’s largest and oldest advertising products. This year, my experiences have been different in the following ways: the number of projects and deliverables, the amount of responsibility that I have been given, the increased exposure to clients, and the overall size of the department in which I work.
I am really humbled and excited by this opportunity and am really learning a lot about satisfying clients (which is awesome for a marketing double major.) I really feel that the fact that I am allowed to work on projects such as these demonstrates the high level of responsibility that is unique to a Google internship.
The other key difference is the size of the department I am in. YouTube is a surprisingly small company within Google! Everything feels like a start-up. All of the branches of YouTube (engineering, sales, marketing, etc) are fit into a single floor of their building. This smallness has contributed to a higher level of learning for me this summer.
Anyway, it’s time for me to sign off! But before I go, I just want to highlight some of the fun things I have done or am about to do!
A sleepover with one of my fellow Google BOLD interns named Tessa
A concert to see Ke$ha and Rihanna at the amphitheatre located right next to Google’s main campus in Mountain View
A visit to the famous former prison Alcatraz in San Francisco
A Pride Parade in San Francisco where I marched with Google’s Gayglers (Gay Googlers) in support of LGBT people everywhere
A 2-story rock climbing wall party with my fellow interns -- the rock climbing wall is actually in one of the office buildings on Main Campus!
An intern sleepover at Main Campus
Until later!
Atima
EMEA Summer Internship Program Kick-Off
July 16, 2010
One week after the official start of the summer, we were excited to welcome over 30 students from over 15 different countries from all over Europe to Google. These remarkable students joined our Online Media Associate Internship at our European Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, and at our Center of Innovation in Wroclaw, Poland.
Throughout the summer, each of our interns will work on their own project within a specific market or functional team. The projects given to interns are as challenging as those given to full-time employees, so this will not be a summer spent delivering coffee! Together with their manager and mentor, they will define the objectives, set deliverables, and work towards a successful finish.
In addition to project work, job-related training, and improving their business skills, our interns will also have plenty of time to enjoy themselves. Social activities on the intern agenda include plenty of foosball and ping-pong matches.
Here are some photos of our Wroclaw (above) and Dublin (below) summer interns. Check back soon for more updates and photos from the EMEA intern program!
Posted by Tobias Marmann, EMEA University Programs Team
Our 2010 EMEA CS4HS Awardees
July 15, 2010
(cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
We recently told you about CS4HS
, our workshop program for high school and middle school computer science teachers in the U.S. We now have some additional news to share: our 2010 EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) CS4HS awardees have been selected!
The CS4HS program provides funding to European, Middle Eastern and African universities which work in tandem with local high schools and middle schools to engage pre-university students in computer science. Awardees meet strict requirements: the projects must be scalable, impact a wide cross-section of students from all backgrounds, conform to a “train the trainer” model and, most importantly, interest and inspire the next generation of computer scientists.
The application review team said that many of the projects receiving funding directly address the training of computer science teachers in secondary schools. They were particularly excited by the Makerere University and University of Cape Town projects, both of which propose to spread best practice amongst educators in Africa—a new region for CS4HS.
You can find a list of all 14 awardees and their projects on the
EMEA section
of the
CS4HS site
.
Posted by Caitlin Pantos, University Programmes Specialist
App Inventor for Android
July 12, 2010
Love your Android-powered phone? Got a great app idea? Not a programmer? Don't worry! We're making it easier to create apps for your Android phone. Today, we
introduced
App Inventor for Android in Google Labs. App Inventor is a new tool that makes it easy for anyone – especially students with limited programming experience – to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. With App Inventor, rather than writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the application's behavior. Check out
some of the apps
students at the University of San Francisco made in their CS0 class this past year.
Visit our
site
to learn more about App Inventor and see more sample apps. To request an invitation, fill out
this form
. We can't wait to see the cool mobile applications you create!
Posted by Karen Parker, Program Manager
Diary of a Summer Intern
July 8, 2010
Hi guys,
I hope you all are doing well. We have been having a crazy summer and I think the best is yet to come. Despite the constant drizzle here, there has been a lot of sunshine in the office. Last week we had a fondue get together during which the interns got to socialize with more Googlers outside of our project team. To say the least, the spread was pretty amazing. Dried fruit, chopped up bananas, strawberries, pineapple and fortune cookies lined a table with a huge bowl of melted milk chocolate at the end. We have the fondue every Thursday afternoon but this Thursday the spotlight was on us and I had fun meeting people. HR did a really good job with this one but I think the best intern event this summer will be the kayaking offsite planned for next week. I am actually a little nervous about it as the weather has not warmed up yet and I do not want to end up in the cold water. But, it will be a grand adventure either way.
In addition to the fondue, a lot of other interesting events took place: I found out that I will be featured in a national magazine. The article will be about my internship at Google and the magazine wants to come to the office to set up a photo shoot. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would get to do something so fun but I am super excited to see what the article will be like when it comes out.
Unfortunately, not everything that happened last week was a good thing. For the last 24 days, I have been doing something called "The 30-Day Challenge" at a local yoga studio. The goal is to take 30 classes in 30 days. At the end you get a free t-shirt and 5 free classes. I was super excited about it until the day before yesterday. I interlaced my fingers to do the typical yoga headstand, but I kicked too hard on the way up and ended up rolling over my interlaced fingers. Upon rolling over them, all of them popped and I was so afraid I had broken them. There is no way I would be able to type if I broke all my fingers. :( Luckily, they were just sprained so it has not affected work too much.
Speaking of work, I have been having a lot of fun working on
my project
. For the last week, I have been working on the code that will act as the mediator between the UI and the database. It has been really cool seeing it come together. Unfortunately, as it is the middle layer it is harder to test without the other parts but I have been working on unit tests and I hope to have the patch submitted soon. Last week, I worked on a notification and the protocol of the synced session. With these patches and the work I hope to do in the next couple days, I am looking forward to having a demo in the next week or so.
Well, that about sums up what I have been doing.
Hope you all had a good holiday,
Jerr
I'll just leave you with one last thing... A Random Google Fact: There is a rock wall and a milkshake station in the Google Kirkland office.
CS4HS: helping high school teachers reach their potential
July 2, 2010
Computer science is a tough field to teach, especially at the high school level. Not only do you need to persuade teenagers that coding isn’t too geeky to attempt, but since CS is a growing field, it’s hard for teachers to keep up with all the latest techniques and computing tools. To help teachers face these challenges, we’re funding a program called Computer Science for High School (
CS4HS
). CS4HS is a workshop for high school and middle school computer science teachers that introduces new and exciting concepts in computing and how to teach them. The ultimate goals are to “train the trainer,” develop a thriving community of high school CS teachers, and spread the word about the awe and beauty of computing.
This summer, we’re funding 20 workshops at colleges across the U.S. and will sponsor another 14 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. If each workshop in the U.S. has an average of 20 teachers in attendance, and each of them teaches 90 students in a year*, that means that the workshops have the potential to make a difference for 36,000 students—an important start.
We had the chance to attend a CS4HS workshop in our own backyard this week.
UC Berkeley’s CS4HS
highlighted hands-on skills that teachers can take directly back to the classroom. Twenty local math and CS teachers had a chance to share tips and best practices around teaching CS, and created a solid foundation for a community. One of the most popular sessions over the two days was a demo of
Scratch
, a popular programming language geared towards K-12 students that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music and art. Attendees also had the opportunity to form the Golden Gate chapter of the
Computer Science Teacher Association
(CSTA).
Although the summer workshops are just getting started, they're already making a difference for teachers. Emmanuel Onyeador, who teaches AP CS at Oakland Technical High School, told us: “CS4HS is the missing link—as computer science teachers, you find yourself isolated in your classroom. When I sit here I find that we’re all talking about the same issues and the same type of students. What I bring back to my classroom will make a big difference.”
You can view a list of all 20 U.S. CS4HS workshops and find more information about the program at
www.cs4hs.com
.
UC Berkeley CS4HS participant
s
*according to the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education
Posted by Mary Radomile, Education Program Manager
Grandmother's guide to video chat
July 1, 2010
(Cross-posted from the
Gmail Blog
)
Often when I tell people that I work on
Google video chat
, I hear stories about how they’ve used it to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones... the list goes on. This got me thinking about how convenient— and sometimes even magical — the experience of video chatting is.
So when I saw that my grandma, who loves keeping in touch with family more than anyone, wasn’t set up to use video chat, I decided to help her get started. While doing so, it occurred to me how many people there must be out there in similar situations. If only there were a simple way that any grandmother could use to get started on her own...
Introducing the Grandmother’s Guide to Video Chat:
This video, along with a
printable guide
, can be accessed at
google.com/chat/grandma
. Feel free to share this link with your grandma—or grandpa—or, well, anyone who wants to video chat to help get them up and running.
And after your grandma is all set up, take a screenshot of you video chatting with her and email it to
grammy324@gmail.com
to share it with us. The first 100 people to do so will get a t-shirt, printable guide and VHS of the video (because if your grandma’s like mine, she’s still a cassette kind of girl).
In a few weeks, we’ll feature the best photos submitted on the
Gmail blog
.
Posted by Jason Toff, Grandson of Evelyn & Ida
Labels
A Day in the Life of a New Grad in Google Dublin
7
AdCamp
2
AdMob
11
Ambassador Program
14
APAC
7
Appy Trails
28
Back to School
4
Better Know a New Grad
1
Better Know an Intern
15
Better Know an Office
4
Black History Month
10
Caitlin Talks to an Engineer
9
Chrome Extensions
3
Chromebook
1
College Tips by Google
1
Community
14
Conferences
16
consortium
1
CSSI
5
Day in the Life
2
deSTEMber
1
Development Programs
1
Diary of a Business Associate Intern
1
Diary of a Summer Intern
41
Diary of a Summer Intern - Erika
9
Diary of a Summer Intern - Franklin
3
Diary of a Summer Intern - Jess
3
Diary of a Summer intern - Luke
3
Diary of a Summer Intern - Madelaine
4
Diary of a Summer Intern - Pablo
3
Diary of a Summer Intern - Rio
4
Diary of a Summer Intern 2012
18
Diary of an MBA Intern
2
Education
19
EMEA
47
Europe
8
Events
13
Exploring Design at Google
4
GHC15
6
Going Green
6
Gone Google
2
Google Code University
1
Google Code-in
1
Google Games
3
Google Japan
1
Google Lime Scholarship
1
Google on campus
2
Google Online Marketing Challenge
10
Google Science Fair
2
Google.org
1
Google+
6
Googlers
14
Googlers Beta
11
Grace Hopper
11
GradTips
9
Hangouts On Air
21
Inside ITRP
6
Intern Insights
31
Intern Program
72
Interns Making an Impact
7
Interviews
1
Jobs
5
just for fun
30
K-12 (Pre-university)
14
LATAM
3
Life at Google
17
Middle East
1
My Path to Google
45
My Summer at Google
15
My Summer at Google 2012
10
North America
4
Office Environment
4
Open Source
9
PhD
7
Products
94
Programs and Competitions
116
Recruiter Tips and Tricks
15
Rice Plus
4
Scholarships
56
Search
1
STEM
2
STEP
1
Student Tips
15
Students
13
Summer of Code
1
Teach Parents Tech
10
Tech Students
3
Tips and Tricks
27
Women in Engineering
21
Young Innovators
10
YouTube
3
Archive
2020
Jul
May
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Feed
Follow @GoogleStudents
Interested in opportunities and programs for students? Visit
google.com/students
.
