If you recently used Google to have food delivered by a restaurant near you, Andrea Chang (BS’17, CIS) - a Google technical solutions consultant who works on that technology - had something to do with it.
This past summer her enjoyment of working at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, was further enhanced by having her brother Charles join her in the Silicon Valley. He is now a junior at Temple who, like his sister before him, is a mathematics and computer science major - and spent this past summer in a highly coveted Google internship in San Francisco.
“It was amazing,” reports Andrea. “I love Google so much and my brother so much and I wanted him to experience what it’s like to work here because I’m just so happy I work for Google.”
Andrea recommended her brother for the internship, but that was just the beginning of an extensive interview process that led to Charles’ internship. “I helped him get in the door,” she says, “but he had to be smart enough to do it.”
As part of his 12-week engineering practicum internship, Charles is helping create a debugging tool for Google’s operating system.
“Temple prepared me really well to learn and I learned so much computer science in just a short period of time,” says Charles. “Every day I was surrounded by amazingly talented and supportive people. It was a great experience.”
At Temple, Andrea was an undergraduate research assistant in robotics, nuclear/particle physics and linear and dynamic computer programming. The President’s Scholar most enjoyed programming a re-created 3-D Pacman game and spending two summer months in 2016 as a virtual reality research assistant at National Taiwan University.
Andrea treasured her CIS professors and Rose McGinnis, the college’s director of the Undergraduate Research Program: “They just felt like a second family to me. They truly cared not just about my educational growth but my personal growth too.”
After her May 2017 graduation, for a year she worked in New York City as an IBM software engineer. Then, last October, she joined Google in northern California. Like her brother, she raves about the work/life balance environment that Google fosters.
For example, says Andrea, “Google has a program that allows you to spend 20 percent of your time investigating a different area. I’m furthering the virtual reality research I did in Taiwan.”
The Changs have three younger siblings. “It would be amazing if I could get all of them here too,” says Andrea. “In fact, my brother Justice is a mathematics and computer science major at Temple.”