Fawning Over Founders

Today involved another very early start as we had to get to the buses at 7:00am. Yrgh. Anyway, we arrived at the Googleplex for breakfast, a lively and interesting talk by Corrina Cortes, a tour and some assorted technical talks.

The highlight of the day was the networking event at the close of the day at Google, where we spent time talking with the other girls. However, all of a sudden, some Googlers materialized and began to mingle. Brittany kept saying, "get a photo, get a photo". I assumed she meant Meng, the Googler who gets pictures with famous visitors, who had just sat down at our table. However, it soon became clear that Sergey Brin was being introduced to us. At first, only eight of the 175 of us were aware of this, and as he was introduced to our table Brittany and I were two of those eight. He had some interesting things to say, particularly about the problems of decreasing enrollment in CS in general and in particular decreasing enrollment of women in CS. Finally, the girl next to me piped up with a very nice thank you (for the trip, the day, the opportunity, etc) and then tacked on a photo request. Sergey said, "if I start this, I'm going to get a lot of photo requests...ok, let's do it this way. We'll have two photos. Whoever has the best camera can take one, and then we'll take one with that person in the picture." Everyone held up their cameras, and luckily I had the best one (I'm so thankful I brought my D50)! So it was decided I would take the picture:


And here's the one with me in it:



Just before we left, we were introduced to another famous Googler, Thunder Parley, who insisted we Google him. The result is amusing!