Piazza Careers is transforming the college recruiting landscape. Because we have a personal relationship with all the brightest minds in the country at Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and more who are using Piazza as a learning platform, we invited companies to hear first hand from the top students on our platform, how best to engage and recruit them. We are starting the conversation so you can continue it to attract the top technical talent to your company.
Kevin is a data science intern at Facebook, working on the Internet.org initiative which aims to bring internet to the entire world. He grew up on the east coast in Boston and currently is a student at Georgetown University. Outside of data science and learning about machine learning, Kevin enjoys playing all kinds of sports, from volleyball to basketball. The best weekend adventure he's had this summer has been going skydiving and biking in SF.
Sherman goes to school right down the street as a coterminal master's student in Computer Science at Stanford. He's currently working on the mobile team at Khan Academy while working part-time as an iOS developer at a healthtech startup. When he's not reading up on healthcare or hacking on a side project, he's probably playing Ping Pong or Basketball.
Rohan is a born-and-raised Texan from Houston, and flew a whopping 45 minutes to go to college at UT Austin (where he majors in computer science and mathematics and minors in government). When he isn’t working on building cool software at Apple, he can be found singing in UT’s only all-male a cappella group (shoutout to the Texas Songhorns), writing for UTCS’s department blog, or introducing people to computer science as a freshman mentor, although it’s much more likely you’ll find him re-watching The West Wing for the 4th time. This is Rohan’s second summer interning at a tech company and his first summer in the Bay Area, and he’s looking forward to exploring San Francisco whenever he can.
Bec attends Duke University and is currently interning at AltspaceVR, a virtual reality software company based in Redwood City. For fun, she dabbles in 3D modeling/animation and digital art. In her free time, she enjoys exploring new cities.
Aditya is attending Carnegie Mellon University where he is studying Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as Computer Science. This summer, he's in the Bay Area and currently interns at ClearSlide. When he’s not coding, he loves playing video games and being an active member of the CMU eSports club. During the day, his favorite outdoor activity is playing soccer, but he dreams in Python. The best weekend adventure he’s had this summer was just a few weeks ago when his team won third place in a hackathon. One of his favorite books is Timeline by Michael Crichton and if his life were a movie, it would be October Sky.
Mohamed Kane is a rising junior at MIT currently interning at Facebook. When he dreams in code, he dreams in Python because it is useful for scripting, data mining and writing web apps. Going to Crepevine on weekends and seeing friends on Castro Street is a highlight of being in the Bay Area. He spends most of his time on LinkedIn and Facebook catching up on news and if he had a superpower, it would be to allow him to have a different superpower everyday. His favorite class in college was Introduction to Statistical Inference, which teaches the tools required to model and learn from the world using probabilities. He is also very interested in Social Psychology and likes learning about how people react in different situations.
Albert is back in his hometown – the Silicon Valley – to spend the summer away from the sunny beaches of San Diego to intern at Google. During the school year, when he's not busy coding away at a homework assignment or devising ideas for his next side project, he's probably busy answering questions in the labs (or on Piazza!) for the various CS classes that he tutors. Over the weekends, you can probably catch him racing down the hills and mountains of the Bay Area on his bicycle, or even loading up his backpack with heavy camera equipment to explore uncharted territories in the backcountry.
Adam is a Computational Physics student at the University of Edinburgh and just finished his year abroad at UC Berkeley. This summer, he is making the most of his stay in the Bay by interning at OpenTable. When he’s not coding, he likes to read manga, watch anime, see a good movie and of course, eat out. He also enjoys hiking and weightlifting. If his life was a movie, it would be Up and one of his favorite books is 1984 by George Orwell. When asked what coding language he dreams in his answer was “java, so much java."
Pouneh attends UC Davis and is currently working at Intel. When she’s not coding, she enjoys watching TV shows, cat videos and hiking in places near like Rancho San Antonio or far like Switzerland. When she’s not busy studying, she likes to travel and hopes to go to South East Asia, specifically Thailand to visit their tiger zoo. In her free time she also loves to read Cornelia Funke and Tamora Pierce, but her favorite book of all time is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
Julia is a Georgia Tech student and is currently interning at Box. While at George Tech, she loves participating in her sorority and her favorite class so far was Natural Language Processing. Though the material was hard, she found it fascinating. When asked what coding language she dreams in, she said it’s more of a nightmare, bringing her back to the days she had to learn recursion in Assembly. Some of her favorite outdoor activities include hiking and scuba diving. Her favorite book is Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.
Brian was born and raised in SoCal but came up North to intern at Coursera as a KPCB Fellow. When he isn't coding at work, Brian either codes at hackathons or for an organization he helps run called CodeTheChange which does pro-bono software development for philanthropic non-profits. Outside of programming, Brian loves physical activity of any type which can include playing basketball, running, or hip hop dancing. If you have any music, food, and outdoor adventure recommendations, let him know!
Born in India and raised in Dubai, Akhil headed over from the Midwest to spend his third summer in the Bay Area at Coursera. When he's not coding, Akhil likes to divide his time between reading everything from young adult novels to the history of philosophy, going on hikes to enjoy the immense natural beauty in Northern California, and playing any instrument he can get his hands on. Akhil's a city-kid at heart and loves going up to San Francisco as often as he sample the incredible food or to just explore and uncover its hidden gems.
Luqi Pan recently graduated from Brown University with his Masters degree in CS and started working at Yelp this week! In his free time, he enjoys skiing, diving and hiking. The best weekend adventure he’s had so far this summer was a solo road trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park. If his life could be a movie, it would be The Matrix and when he dreams in code, he dreams in Haskell. The tech device that he cannot live without would be his MacBook
Carina just graduated from UC Berkeley with her B.A. Computer Science this year! She's spending her summer visiting family and traveling across Asia and Europe, and then starting as a Software Engineer at Google in August. She loves being able to design and develop awesome experiences for users. She wants to build an impactful startup in the future. Besides tech, she really enjoys teaching and mentoring, and hopes to give talks and continue sharing knowledge at Google and meetups. Carina loves the outdoors—hiking, camping, and scuba diving are some of her favorites. She's excited to be starting a new hobby, hang gliding, this September!
Adam Canady is a Software Engineering Intern at Synack in Redwood City and will be a senior, studying Computer Science and Economics, at Carleton College in the fall. Recently he has been reading The Martian and while it's really addicting, he also loves to get outdoors for a good hike or kayak in one of many awesome spots around the Bay. He loves to build and fly quadcopters, but since they crash quite a bit, he crafted his own 3D printer to make replacement parts. He's also an avid fan of Game of Thrones, but between side projects and Netflix Original Series, he hasn't quite found the time to finish the 5th season yet, so no spoilers please!
Jacob is a recent graduate who now works in Business Ops at Piazza. While studying English at Cornell University, Jacob stumbled into an introductory computer science course and discovered the exciting possibilities of programming. As he was gearing up for a CS graduate program in his last semester, he learned of an opportunity at Piazza where he could combine his interests in technology and higher education while making a positive impact on the world. The choice was easy and thus he began his life out West. More likely than not, you will find Jacob playing video games, building computers, reading old-fashioned paper books, or watching a movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
Shelby joins us at Piazza after meeting the team last summer and meeting our founder as a finalist at the Piazza Silicon Valley Women’s tech tour. Hailing from MIT, she enjoys spending time at home in the Bay Area, especially being close to the ocean and eating at Fuki Sushi. When she’s not coding or dreaming in Javascript, she wishes she could dive deeper into brain and cognitive sciences to gain a deeper understanding of human intelligence along with artificial intelligence. Shelby loves reading books and uses Notion to organize her thoughts around life. If you’d love to enjoy a new book, she suggests Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.
David travelled across the country from Boston to intern at Piazza this summer. If he couldn’t major in Computer Science, he would probably choose Mechanical Engineering (although Aerospace is a close third). When he’s not coding, he enjoys making origami and building loft add-ons. His favorite activity in college is the annual MIT Mystery Hunt, which involves solving puzzles, staying up for 48 hours straight, and drinking an obscene amount of coffee.
Tucker is a born and raised New Hampshirite. He’s a University of New Hampshire Wildcat who studies Computer Science. He has recently developed a taste for teaching and served as a teaching assistant this past school year. When he isn’t in the classroom he can be found cruising around town on his fabulous single-speed road bike or watching The Matrix for the thousandth time. He doesn’t dream in code, but has the occasional nightmare in SML. This is Tucker’s first time on the West Coast and even after a month he still can’t believe how beautiful it is.
Laurel started as a math major at Carnegie Mellon University and quickly switched over to Computer Science once she realized how awesome it is. She’s here this summer working with Piazza and loves the sunny-but-not-too-hot weather and all the nerdy people everywhere. She adores Piazza and pizza (as some people at Carnegie Mellon call it) and she spends her time biking around to farmers markets and coffee shops, taking care of 3 boisterous chickens and making quick weekends trips to San Francisco. When she’s not trying to rabidly catch up on Orange is the New Black or Tumblin', she likes to obsess over every pixel on a page she’s working on ("should that be one to the left or one to the right?”) or find cat images as placeholders on the page she’s making.
Mahamad is an engineering intern at Piazza and a rising senior at UPenn studying computer science and statistics. A huge fan of international cuisine, his favorite restaurant in the Valley so far is a small diner called Kabob and Curry, a south asian restaurant with Chicken Tikka Masala to die for 44. When he's not coding, Mahamad spends his free time exploring outdoor activities in California, including hiking up multiple waterfalls at Yosemite National Park and getting some of the best views of the peaks in Yosemite. Also an avid reader, Mahamad recently finished reading The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov and is currently working on Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Kimberly is a UCSB grad and the Head of People Operations at Earnest, a next generation financial technology company intent on improving consumer lending. Her favorite memory from college was her summer internship where she wrote for her local paper. She remembers early, quiet Santa Barbara mornings that led into exciting investigations of rumors in local politics. It was "small town", but a great experience. In her free time, she likes to hike on the Peninsula on the weekends. This year, Earnest has grown from 25 to 90 people -- and it's only July. The People and Culture challenges associated with that growth have been some of the most exciting and difficult challenges that she experienced professionally.
Sean is a University of Redlands grad and currently works at Earnest as a Recruiting Guru & Talent Manager. At Earnest, he is tackling the exciting challenge of company growth while maintaining quality hiring standards. Earnest has grown from 25 employees to 90 and their growth projections are massive. One of his favorite memories from college is when he was appointed as a lead Residence Assistant, meaning he was in charge of a freshman dorm. He got to school three weeks before it started, decorated the hall, made fun plans for the students and shortly thereafter, greeted 300 freshman guys and gals. It was a blast! In his free time, he loves to spend time brunching, shopping, and exploring all aspects of the Marina. In the summer, he loves all things baseball and is likely at a Giants game.
Bob is the Director of Data Engineering at Invoice2go and a University fo Pittsburgh alumni. Invoice2go is a mobile-first app the helps small businesses with their cashflow. He has been doing a lot of interesting work around clustering industry segments, finding out how different external factors like weather, seasonality and major events affect the cashflow of different small business segments. One of Bob's favorite college memories is falling in love with rugby and playing for the Pitt club team. In his downtime, he likes to mountain bike and spend time with his two daughters. Most recently, he has been playing with Go and loves the simplicity if it.
Born and raised in Walnut Creek, Andy returned home to the Bay Area after graduating from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo to begin a career in executive search and recruitment consulting. During that portion of his career, Andy consulted for a number of Accel, Sequoia, and Greylock-backed software companies. He now runs Alfresco Software’s global talent and recruiting programs, leading the effort to grow Alfresco from approximately 400 employees to 1,000 and beyond. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with family, supporting the San Francisco Giants and the San Jose Earthquakes, hiking, and barbecuing.
Hayley is the Director of Staffing at Datera. She studied business at the University of Oregon and received her MBA from SJSU. Datera lets web-scale enterprises bring order to their data chaos. They evolve infrastructure from automating processes to automating interactively – transforming how it is planned, operated and scaled. Since joining Datera last year they have more than doubled their engineering headcount and scaled their recruiting operations to implementing innovative collaborative solutions. In her downtime, she loves family fun time with her 7-year-old twins and dog Chili, remodeling her house and taking adventurous trips.
Rajesh is a software engineer at Switch and a Cochin University of Science and Technology graduate. One of the exciting challenges he is facing at Switch is helping innovate telecom with new approaches. As a cloud telephony company, Switch strives to give power to the user with a unified platform for all communication needs. Rajesh writes scalable components and designs elastic infrastructure while having fun in the process. In his downtime, he enjoys taking his kids to parks and trails and loves watching them solve problems. When he dreams in code, he dreams in Python, but dreams in swift for App Dev.
Moses is a San Jose State alum and works in People Operations at Switch. At Switch, he has helped grow the company from 20 people to 100+. One of his favorite memories from college is winning a marketing video challenge by lip sync'ing the backstreet boys "Show me the meaning of being lonely" music video. In his free time he enjoys making beer, photography and hanging out with his dog
Aditya Ganjam, Vice President of Engineering at Conviva, is currently responsible for leading and growing the software development team, driving the technology behind Conviva’s real-time optimization platform, and developing Conviva’s innovative products. As a founding member of the Conviva team, Mr. Ganjam has spent his entire professional career at Conviva, holding progressively more key engineering roles. Most recently, he was Conviva’s Chief Architect and led product definition, technology strategy, and new product incubation. Prior to that, he was a lead engineer and team lead for several areas within Conviva’s engineering team. Before joining Conviva, Mr Ganjam was a Ph.D. student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, where, as a member of the End System Multicast project, he contributed to the building of the world’s first peer-to-peer live streaming system. Mr Ganjam earned Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Prem is the VP of Engineering at Tactile and is working on building a sync platform for structured data which serves as the backend for Tactile's mobile products. Starting out as their first Engineer he has now moved on to building out the Engineering and Product teams at Tactile. Prior to Tactile, Prem spent time at Barnes and Noble building the Nook reader and tablet and at Motorola working on their flagship Android phones. He spends his downtime answering questions that his 5 year old daughter poses and hiking the trails of Yosemite.
Chris is on the Talent team at Wealthfront and is a graduate of the College of William and Mary.Wealthfront looks to make sophisticated financial advice available to everyone and is the world's largest automated investing platform. One of his favorite college experiences was participating in his college acapella team and in his free time he likes to explore San Francisco, coffee shops and foodie spots. Staying true to his love for coffee, he wishes he could code in Java.
Jon grew up in the UK and attended the University of Plymouth where he studied Computing and Informatics. Jon was a very early employee at Boku and it has been a challenge over the last seven years to transition from doing things quickly to get traction on product to now do things at scale for enterprise customers who have much more demanding requirements. Jon currently serves as the VIP of Technical Operations at Boku. One of his favorite sayings is ‘Every day is a school day’ because it’s so true. There is always something new to learn, a new challenge or obstacle to overcome and that’s what he love about working with technology. When he’s not coding, he enjoys soccer, baseball, swimming, hiking or any sport or activity he can share with his 3-year-son.
Nadia is a Recruiting Manager at Quora where she runs the university recruiting department. She lives and breathes recruiting at Quora and loves the challenges of her job, which require her to be a full-time recruiter, event planner and a confidante to students. She has traveled all across the country and enjoys meeting really amazing people. As a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo grad, she has fond memories of “family" dinners with her college friends. In her free time, she tries to spend time outside with her friends and loves to cook/eat. She is also a big Bay Area sports fan as she is a Bay Area native.
Tommy is a Harvard alum and currently works at Quora where he is an Engineering Manager. Quora is a Q&A platform with the ultimate goal of sharing and growing the world's knowledge. Tommy joined Quora two years ago as an iOS engineer, and he’s since had the opportunity to work on projects like improving the speed of their apps and re-architecting their native codebase to support tablets. Now, he is the engineering manager for their mobile team, and he is really excited to help grow the engineering organization. In his free time, he enjoys amateur bartending, watching the Red Sox, and playing Super Smash Bros. One of his favorite college memories is teaching CS as a TA where he was able to help students and get them excited about learning.
Olivia is a Stanford alum and currently works a Medallia where she is their University Programs Specialist. She has been on Medallia's campus recruiting team from its inception to now, helping grow the company from about 300 employees to 800+ in just over a year. Medallia is a cloud based software platform—helping some of the largest companies in the world improve their relationships with their customers. Their customer experience software captures customer feedback, analyzes it in real-time, and delivers it to everyone in the company—from C-suite to the frontline—to help create experiences that customers love. When she’s not busy recruiting, she loves to go hiking, hang out in Santa Cruz, and spend time with friends in SF.
Keeyong is the Director of Data Infrastructure at San Francisco based Udemy and a Seoul National University grad. Udemy is the world's online learning marketplace where 7+ Million students from 190 countries are taking courses in anything from programming to yoga to photography and more. At Udemy, Keeyong has tackled setting up big data Infrastructure from scratch and applies data science to improve their KPIs around learning and engagement. His favorite memory from college is a PC BIOS project where he developed firmware using Assembly language. In his free time, he enjoys teaching Python to his kids.
Matthew Tamayo-Rios is the CEO and founder of CEO of Kryptnostic, a team of determined optimists united by the belief that individuals and organizations can safely leverage their data in the cloud. Previously, Matthew worked at Microsoft on the OS Security team and at Palantir on the government side of the business. He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at RPI and Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington. His initial foray into computer security was at the early age of nine, hacking his mother's point of sale retail system to adjust the ice cream inventory. In his limited free time, he spends time with his wife, training for the California squat record, or wine tasting in Napa.
Antoine is a Stanford alum and works as a Computer Engineer at Datera. One of the biggest challenges he has worked on at Datera as a UI engineer was developing a framework for a real-time, live-updating GUI that was compatible with their custom back-end distributed database. They ended up building most of the framework in-house rather than using a pre-existing one, which required a good deal of design work. One of his favorite memories from college was taking a course in the “d.school” (or Design School) and learning to think and approach problems in new and interesting ways that normally aren’t taught in engineering courses. He also recalls being in one of the first courses to use Piazza when it was just being launched, which is also a fond memory. In his spare time, he likes to cook and bake, hike and explore the outdoors. He also enjoys developing his spiritual side through meditation and martial arts.