Balaji Vanjinathan is a first-year student in the full-time MBA program at Weatherhead. He shares his experience as a participant in the San Francisco Day Trek, organized by Weatherhead's Career Management Office (CMO) in March. Follow CMO on Twitter: @weatherheadcmo.
Day 1:
Intel Tour - We had the privilege
of visiting the Intel Headquarters in Santa Clara. Kamieka Hariston, MBA '07, met
us at the reception and gave us a tour of the Intel Museum where we had the opportunity
to get an inside view on how Intel manufactures microprocessors. After the tour,
we had a one-on-one session with Kamieka. The session helped students to better
understand Intel’s competitive advantage and what it is like to work for a
company like Intel. Kamieka also shared her career path and personal experience
at Intel with us and described it as “challenging yet rewarding.” It was
evident form our discussion that Kamieka is a true advocate of Intel and has
had a tremendous career at the company.
Day 1:

Informational Interview: There were informational
interviews for the students with select Weatherhead alumni. CMO did a really
good job of connecting students with alumni who had similar backgrounds or with
alumni who were working in industries similar to the students’ interests.
Personally, I benefited a lot from this session because the alumni I met with
gave me a picture of how to go about a job search or what is the best fit for
my work experience and my passion.
Alumni Dinner
Reception: This
was one of the best alumni reception dinners that I have attended so far. The
alumni from SF were really excited to meet the students and were really
helpful. The student to alumni ratio was almost 1:3. The students not only met
all of the alumni, but we also had the opportunity to spend quality time with
each and every one of the alumni. We met some great people at this dinner, some
who graduated as recently as 2014 and some as early as 1968. Dean Widing was
also a part of the event and he spent time with the all of us sharing his
experiences.
Day 2:
Google Office – On the second day
of the event, Jeff Rozic, BS '01, and Alicia Sanchez, BS '10, hosted our
group at Google’s YouTube office, and we had a very interesting conversation
over breakfast. Some of the conversation was around the startup scenario and
how it is evolving into something bigger and better day-by-day, how Google
helps small companies do business by enabling online sales channels, etc.
BrandLab visit – Google has created a
studio where they enable the brands to grow their brand-building capabilities.
Google in partnership with the brands and their agencies come up with
strategies to understand how to better connect with the consumers across a
diverse segment by using Google’s tools and technologies. Jeff Rozic was a
great host and he gave us an inside look to the amount of data that is
available for brands and how it enables brands to come up with actionable
insights. He also helped us understand the pricing mechanism for Youtube
advertisements, what are the challenges that Google faces and how Google sells
itself as a brand. This visit gave us an idea of how one of the biggest
companies in the world does business with all types of brands, be it small
businesses or a large conglomerate.
Lyve visit – Lyve is a startup
based out of Cupertino. CMO had planned
it in such a way that we get to see companies at both ends of the spectrum,
organizations with more than thousands of employees and a startup with less
than hundreds of employees. At Lyve we had the opportunity to interact with the
COO and marketing managers. They gave us an introduction about the product and
what it is like to work for a small company. One of the most interesting
aspects of the session was when they asked us for ideas to improve the user
experience and the awareness among smartphone users about their product. The
students were given around ten minutes to work in groups of three to come up
with ideas. The employees of Lyve were really impressed by the ideas that we
had come up with and said some of the ideas would be incorporated into the
product.
Overall,
we spent quality time at every office getting to know what it is like to work
for a company in the Silicon Valley and a lot of the alumni were very helpful
in guiding us and providing us with valuable information that we would need in
the internship and job search. It was a very well organized event by CMO staff
for the benefit of the students. I would highly recommend that future students
attend these events, as they are a good pathway to connect with a lot of the
alumni and relevant business people.
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