Rich, Jenna, Sailu, Montse and myself spent a couple of hours at "UCSC" (yes, in Santa Cruz!) giving an overview of AOL, the technology and careers. This was aimed towards the Computer Science students.
Of course Free Pizza and T-Shirts always help.
Firstly, if I were a student at UCSC, I'd love it. It is such a beautiful location -- lots of trees, lots of green fields, and in the distance the ocean. Infact on a day like today, if I were a student I'd be in heaven there -- it was such a nice day....
Next, one of the questions I ask in these types of events (before I give the presso) is what the audience thinks of, when they hear "AOL". Today we got some really good feedback :
- ISP (of course)
- Community - lots of people chatting or in one place.... hmm, sounds good right?
- AIM
- CDs :-)
We had more comments than that... But the community one really stuck in my mind - the fact that a younger generation still thinks AOL is part of the online community is great.
Rich and Sailu discussed the kinds of software and challenges we have to solve here - the things like building software to scale to millions... All great stuff.
Finally, at the end of the session we had folks come up, asking about internships. We got resumes. One of the students demo'd some of his CSS/Javascript work -- which looked really great. I took down his name, and we'll see if we can have him interview.
We will do more of the college events in the future - it's very important. But I think we left the students today with a firm understanding of AOL Silicon Valley plus the software we build, and the millions it reach. Sometimes we forget that we build some cool stuff, that is used by lots of people.
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and we did have a few resumes sent in - for that internship role as well as Project Infusion and they have already been routed and put into process!!!! :-)
It was a great day! ~ Jenna