Wharton Tech Blog

So I too, like 20 or so other Wharton students (actually, no one really knows the exact count), was an intern at Google in Mountain View, CA this summer.  Unlike Igor (see blog below this one) who worked in the NASO part of the Sales organization which manages Google’s largest advertisers i.e. Fortune 1000 clients, most of us were hired into the Online Sales and Operations (OSO) group which basically manages the rest of Google’s client base (a.k.a. the “long tail”).  Since Igor provided such a thorough summary of a day-in-the-life of an intern, I’ll shed some light on how our OSO summer program was structured and what my own project involved.

This year was the first time that OSO offered a formally structured MBA summer program, hiring over 70 students from top schools including Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT Sloan, NYU Stern, Kellogg, Columbia, etc.  Most of us stayed for 10-12 weeks and were offered the choice of three different start dates depending on when we finished our school terms or if we had pre/post internship travel plans.  Because of the short duration of the internship, we were all assigned internal consulting projects that addressed current business problems OSO faced.  Although this was not reflective of the people management aspects of the full-time OSO Manager position, it was a great way for us to get immersed into the Google culture and observe what the full time role is like.  To guide us on our projects, we were each assigned a ‘host manager’ from the different functional and product divisions within OSO such as AdWords, AdSense, Consumer Operations, Checkout, YouTube, OSO Engineering, etc. 

I worked in the Consumer Operations (ConOps) division this summer which is responsible for providing support to all the users of Google’s 35+ consumer products like Search, Gmail, Maps, Earth, News, Toolbar, Apps, etc.  My project involved looking at the division from a high-level organizational perspective (as opposed to digging deeper into product-specific issues), identifying the key business and structural challenges it faced and recommending an action plan for addressing these challenges.  I also helped with developing a training program for new managers and worked with a few other ConOps interns on figuring out a global resource allocation model.

However, it was definitely not all work this summer - the MBA recruiting team did a great job of organizing social events for us including baseball games, boat cruises, cooking classes, winery trips, etc.  All this, in addition to the usual perks at Google (food, food and more food), made for a very fun and rewarding summer!