Country Day Middle School Students were honored to have Mr. Rose, 11-year Google veteran and Founder of Ready by Area 120 at Google, speak to them about his personal journey getting to Google and navigating various career paths through the tech giant.

Mr. Rose chronicled his time in marketing working in South Korea, which led him to Google in a marketing capacity, but then allowed him to move through various other positions in tech support, programing, customer relations and now Team Lead at Area120. He stressed that there are many careers at Google aside from those geared toward the stereotypical Computer Science major and that it’s a wonderful place to work because while they don’t necessarily encourage you to fail, they support you when you do.

Notably, Mr. Rose had worked at Niantic Labs at Google (Pokemon GO, Ingress) and was also here to talk about how Area120 is incubating a Location Based Augmented Reality (AR) game that would engage users through outdoor, collaborative and personal experiences. He described the story-telling aspect of this new game and how they are working on ways to cause users to be aware of their surroundings, perhaps a way to bridge the augmented immersive properties of AR with the reality of the real world increasing engagement but also building increased safety features into the game.

Finally, and most inspiring, was the Q&A session which lasted more than 30 minutes.  Questions ranged from, “Why are there so many Pidgey’s in Pokemon GO!?” to “How do you protect your users from danger?”  Students were also curious about how Mr. Rose got a job at Google and, to that end, he noted some of the questions he was asked that he does not believe are still being asked today such as, “How many tennis balls will fit in a school bus?”  He stated that it’s not a practical question to literally answer, but one where Google is looking for someone who doesn’t crumble, stays calm and can describe the path they would take to attempt to come to an answer.

Rolling Hills Country Day School thanks Mr. Rose for his time and insight!