>> I was actually a transfer student, so fresh, I'm from Minnesota originally.
Freshman year of college I went to the University of St. Thomas,
which is a school in Minnesota, and transferred to Pomona largely
because I wanted a really small campus environment and,
but within sort of a larger context.
I think the Claremont Colleges are a great resource for us
because Pomona never felt too small to me, even though it's only about 1500 students total.
So I really liked that.
I think the -- if I had to say, like, the one big key for me was I wanted to be
in an environment where people were still very, they're very smart
and very adept but they're very collaborative.
So I think what I always thought of is that people are very competitive with themselves
at Pomona but not necessarily competitive against each other.
So I really appreciated that a lot.
And I was sort of cognizant of that coming in,
so that's a big reason I chose it in the first place.
And then So Cal weather is nothing to complain about, of course.
So out of Pomona I decided to do a year of AmeriCorps service work.
So I worked with New Sector Alliance, which is a nonprofit consulting firm.
And I was staffed at the Red Cross.
So for all intents and purposes, I worked full time for the Red Cross for that year.
And in March of that year I started interviewing, I wanted to line up jobs
for when the program ended that summer.
And I got an offer from a start-up that was called Wildfire, and I asked to defer
to the start date until September so that I could finish my year of service work.
And they agreed to that.
And then at some point that June or July, I got a call from the HR person at Wildfire saying,
hey, we actually just got acquired by Google, so when you start in September,
you'll actually be at Google, not Wildfire.
We'll still operate within Google, but it will actually be owned by Google.
So I was, like, okay, that's fine.
I was actually, to be frank, I was somewhat ambivalent about it at the time because I'd sort
of wanted to work specifically at a start-up.
In hindsight, though, I was definitely glad that it happened.