I wrote and published this article on LinkedIn in the summer of 2019, after I finally “got back” my full-time offer from Google through a stressful and turbulent journey of navigating. Now summer is around the corner and a new batch of interns - undergrads, MBA, PhDs — are embarking on their internship soon; I decide to publish this again as many of the tips are still resonating, even for myself as I re-read it.
Dear Google interns,
It’s the middle of August. Your summer internship is about to end. You are in a rush to maximize your remaining weeks — fill your water bottle with Kombucha, uncover hidden-gem tea bars and use up the massage points. Besides these no-brainers, I assume you also want the three months’ strenuous efforts and outstanding achievement pays off: securing a full-time offer and paving a way towards your long-term career goal.
As a former MBA intern, who went through an unusually winding journey and eventually re-joined Google after one year’s ups and downs (I’ll elaborate later), I’d love to extract from some hindsight to provide a few unsolicited advices on how to wrap up your internship beautifully. Though these takeaways apply generally to internships and can be an interesting read for those curious about what interning at Google is like, as an upfront disclaimer, specific rules and processes mentioned are only relevant to my experience as an MBA marketing intern in Google US and might change at another program, function, region and over time.
Let’s start with what is the most critical piece to a successful internship:
Your reviewers and their review of you.
This might be covered by your recruiter but it’s worth highlighting again — the only material you’ll be evaluated upon by the hiring committee is your package, among which the written review by your reviewers, anecdotally, constitutes the piece which carries the most weight and which, delightfully, you can still put efforts to improve.
1.Select reviewers who have the highest willingness and the best eloquence to be your advocate.
You must have built wide rapport with people you worked with, but it doesn’t hurt to perform some due diligence on whether the good chemistry is felt mutually and whether the positive feedback correlates with sufficient efforts in putting together a strong review. You can draft a list of reviewer candidates, seek their feedback on examples of your strengths and areas for improvement and gauge their potential commitment through open conversation, and even find out through a third person what do they really think of you, before screening the list to three or four. If you have a large fandom, allocate more points to those with extensive experience and writing skills.
2.Create a repository of all your stories
Put yourself in the reviewers’ shoes, as deeply as they care for you, writing your review is one in their thousands of tasks, so try to make their lives easier in crossing the action item that might make or break your successful conversion.
Rummage through your folders such as “MBA application” or “summer internship” for a similar repository, where you were urged by an essay consultant or a career coach to enumerate all your impressive leadership stories. This time, categorize your stories under the buckets of Google’s hiring criteria, so that your reviewers, whenever in need of vivid examples to acclaim your merits, can easily navigate through your mini Google memoir.
Below are some of my examples:
Don’t forget to attach a list of links to all interim and final deliverables during your internship — leave some legacy!
3. Branch out from your turf to whatever interests you
When looking for internships at Google, we are required to apply generally and then invited to interview for a function and a product area that might or might not align with our initial interests. When a full-time offer is given, the intern will go back to the organization rolling up to the VP ( Product Manager ladder is an exception). For example, I interned at brand marketing team at Google Cloud and am supposed to return to the team under VP of Brand in Google Cloud.
Because most of us MBA interns don’t get to choose the team, we tend to skew our efforts of research and networking towards the organization we can return to. However, I strongly encourage you to use the valuable three months as not only a launchpad to get into Google, assuming that’s what you want, but also as a cursory exploration into the humongous and intricate world of the tech industry. Hopefully, you can get a clearer answer to where to start after graduation or how to pave the way towards your end goal, inside or outside of Google.
The odds of re-interviewing adds to the importance of branching out. The three results for internship conversions are: an offer (to your original team), good for Google (but not for your original team), and not good for Google. If you pass the criteria but your team have no headcount, you might get a “good for Google”, are considered for other roles, possibly in other functions or product areas and are reached out by recruiter for interviews any time throughout your second school year. A head start in studying the convoluted terminology of roles, ladders, functions and product area will be extremely conducive. Simply having contacts whom you can talk to later on helps too.
During my internship, I’ve done 60+ coffee chats across the organization and built a spreadsheet as below to record those talks. When I wrestled with the stressful and opaque re-interviewing process, I received enormous help from colleagues outside of Google Cloud.
I got my return offer to go back to Cloud Marketing team initially. Two months before my graduation, I was notified that my headcount, along with those of my peer interns in Cloud Marketing, was eliminated unfortunately due to an organizational change, and we had to go through internal interviews again to find a new team match. My interview journey spans three months and ten roles in various functions across YouTube, Ads, Google Shopping and Cloud. I jokingly told my friends that if they’d interview for Google, there’s a good chance one of my research notes can be relevant.
The linchpin in navigating this quintessential “Googley” re-interviewing process — vague, time-consuming and multi-stakeholder, is that one has to be relentlessly proactive. I sent emails to basically every person on my networking spreadsheet to inquire about potential openings and seek endorsement, and to my delightful surprise, most of them offered advice and help in many ways. These branching out efforts culminated in the two offers I got eventually — Strategy and Operation at Cloud Marketing and Global Product Lead at App Monetization. The former offer was given to me in an email from CMO of Google Cloud; she said that multiple folks, whom I worked with during internship and maintained contact with, mentioned my situation and career interest to her, and therefore she thought of me once the opening was created. The latter interview opportunity was given to me after I reached out to a senior leader, a Kellogg alumni and whom I had great conversation with last summer, and he graciously forwarded my resume to his team ( now my team!)
4. Prepare for on-campus recruiting
You should expect a decent amount of waiting time before your conversion result is unveiled. I didn’t hear back until the end of Oct. If any company during on-campus recruiting interests you, or you are an international student like me and aim at securing an offer before H1B visa application in April, you should put your best foot forward and now is by no means too early to start, considering the compressed full-time on-campus recruiting timeline.
Helpfulness is my unswerving impression of folks at Google throughout and beyond my internship. Without their continuous support and encouragement, I won’t be able to return, so this article is my first step in paying it forward. Feel free to forward these nudges to whoever that might benefit from them and good luck to all the interns!