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In August 2017, Prakriti Sharma along with her teammates Raghav Shadija, and Ankita Grewal were declared as the Asia-Pacific Regional winners of GOMC (Google Online Marketing Challenge) – a renowned and coveted competition on a worldwide scale. They were felicitated at the Google Offices, in an all-expenses-paid trip to Singapore. We had a quick chat with Prakriti, where she told us the nitty-gritties of competition and her learning experience out of it.

Q1. What are you doing currently?

I graduated from Maitreyi College with a B. Sc in Physical Sciences. I was offered a job through college placements but I resigned within two months. In the meantime, I did freelance projects for clients of different levels in varied domains. I was also offered jobs from CVent, OYO, and other startups, but they didn’t pan out because I felt that I should not rush into another job and be patient. Later, I was offered a job at Gartner for the role of a Marketing Analytics Specialist, which I readily took. Being a fresher, this is the best opportunity I can get.

Q2. How did you come to know about this competition? How did you go about it, whilst managing college?

I got to know about this competition through regular Google surfing. I decided that I wanted to take part in this as I was interested in marketing, despite being a student from the science background. The competition was about Google Adwords, and understandably, it was necessary for us to study extensively. Since I’m very active on LinkedIn, I contacted the previous global winners of the competition and sought advice on how to choose clients and what kind of a business the client should be engaged in. Soon, we developed a strategy according to the finalised client, but because of this, we had to miss internals and classes, something which I was habituated to by then. (laughs)

After submitting a pre-campaign report with the background of the company, we were supposed to run a 21-day campaign on a limited budget. Since the semester exams were coming close, we had to manage exams alongside the campaign. Following an amazing experience of 3 weeks, we had to compile all results in a post-campaign report. It involved mentioning our strategy, weekly reports, results, how much were we able to fulfill, and our learning component out of the competition.

Q3. What was your learning experience from this competition?

I worked with people whom I had never known, and this opportunity was the biggest I’ve ever gotten. Since the platform was Google Adwords, we could not have gotten hands-on experience on it otherwise. We had to work and collaborate with clients and stay within a budget constraint.

It was an amazing experience where I put theory into practical use as I could point out the many loopholes in AdWords by the end of this competition. At the end of the first week’s campaign, we couldn’t fulfill our targets. But, we searched and devised our own optimization tricks and tiny things we would not have noticed otherwise, to get the results to vary drastically. Like this, we discovered many tricks and we finally achieved the desired result by the end, which exceeded our estimations by a huge margin. I’m now able to implement this concept and make sure of the loopholes in my freelancing projects.

Additionally, I’ve learned Facebook PPC and LinkedIn advertising as well, and now I’m involved in company branding. I realised my love for marketing because I tried my hand in so many related activities in my first year in college. Even in my job interviews, I was mainly asked about my role in the competition and the interviewers judged my resourcefulness and interpersonal skills, the campaign problems and how I overcome them.

Q4. How did DU help you in this experience?

In DU, I definitely got a lot of exposure in varied activities. I participated in an umpteen number of competitions and grew personally through every opportunity. If you are active, some teachers do support you in the process. I got to represent my college in a Himalayan conclave in the 2nd year,  that was funded by DU. I also founded a society called Vaigyanik in college to bring all the projects of science students under one umbrella. Many teachers questioned and resisted, but there were many at the same time who helped me and supported me despite my absence in classes. This number of opportunities is certainly not available in other universities.

Q5. Do you have any piece of advice for freshers?

Google has scrapped this competition, but AdWords digital training and video courses and certifications are currently available on the GOMC website for free. Many such online marketing and case study competitions keep happening, for which you have to surf on your own, as such provisions are not provided by DU. I would advise students to go for as many startup events, corporate conferences, and case study competitions as possible. It helps immensely if a student is active on LinkedIn and is able to network and connect, as it helps in personal branding and profile building. Summer schools are also a good option, provided the budget is sufficiently available for that. Subscribing to newsletters and websites can assist one’s search for international events and competitions on a global scale. It only helps if students keep an eye out for as many opportunities as possible.

Q6. How was your experience at the Google Office, Singapore?

We were invited to stay at Singapore for a week’s time in January, where we were felicitated with google merchandise and official recognition as the regional winners of GOMC. After the presentation round of our campaign reports and journey as a team, we were acquainted with the Google office and given umpteen office tours. Sessions were held, and we interacted with Google employees who had been working with Google for the past few years. Soon after that, we began with the much-awaited Singapore tour. All in all, It was a brilliant experience to be a part of.

 

Feature Image Credits: Akarsh Mathur

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Interview by Vijeata Balani

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We’ve always heard of major portion of the Indian youth entering into engineering colleges, but we hardly come across any Indian names in the field of technology. Strange, right? Well, don’t worry, as DU Beat brings to you some technical personalities which might help to sweep away Mark Zuckerberg’s charm a bit.

  1. Ajay Bhatt

Well, you should thank him every time you plug in your phone for charging; every time you connect your external HDD; transfer photos from phone to your PC. He is the man behind USB standard. It is because of him that we are moving towards a unified wire for all sorts of electronic purposes.

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Credits: america.pink

  1. Vinod Dham

He is the man behind the revolutionary processor from Intel that changed the standards of speed in the heads of consumers. Yes, he is the father of Intel’s Pentium Processor. He rose to the ranks of VP of Micro Processors in Intel and then changed to AMD, Intel’s biggest rival in 1995. He is now a venture capitalist funding various start-ups in India.

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Credits: iammadeinindia.com

  1. Vic Gundotra

Google’s social media man, Vic is credited with being the man behind the Google+ social network. Before being a Google Guy, Vic was a Microsoft Man joining the company in 1991 and working there as a general manager of platform evangelism. He made sure independent developer’s get Microsoft’s services. He left Microsoft in 2007 to join Google.

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Ccredits: idownloadblog.com

  1. Amit Singhal

“Google it” – this phrase wouldn’t have ever caught on if Google wouldn’t have keep doing best what is does best- search. Not among the senior management, Amit Singhal is the man overseeing the service which is at the tip of your fingers- Google Search. He is responsible for algorithms and techniques that Google uses to produce search results when someone queries for anything.

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Credits: youtube.com

  1. Ruchi Sanghvi

Men are not the only ones representing Indian achievements in the field of technology. Ruchi Sanghvi was Facebook’s first female engineer. She was part of the team that developed Facebook’s most critically panned feature at the time of the launch- The News Feed. This feature became one of the main features later on but just after launch it was criticised heavily, which led to her and her team to go under a 48 hour coding session amounting to the first rendition of Facebook’s complicated privacy setting. She co-founded Cove, a start-up in 2011 which was acquired by Dropbox in 2012 where she currently serves as a VP.

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Credits: radicalnews.in

  1. Rashmi Sinha

She is the brains behind the website that most of you would probably know as the place to get presentation on any topic – slideshare. She founded the website in 2006 which lets the user upload their work in form of presentation. The company was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012 for $199 million dollars.

Credits: women2.com

Featured Image Credits: nytimes.com

It’s not very usual to see a crowd of over two thousand students rising up in unison to applaud to the simplicity of one man.

Today at SRCC, the CEO of Google, Mr. Sundararajan Pichai addressed a gathering of students from schools, college-goers and corporates. The man of the hour, Mr. Pichai was greeted with enthralling energy and enthusiasm. The event was hosted by the renowned commentator, Harsha Bhogle.

A photo posted by DU Beat (@du_beat) on

 

Mr. Bhogle introduced the CEO by calling the ‘Techies as the Rockstars of the new age’. They started off by talking about his early days in the not-so-fancy hostel room of IIT Kharagpur and how difficult it was to stay connected with the world in the pre-Internet era. Talking about the work space in Google, Mr. Pichai recounted that back in 2004 he felt like ‘a kid in a candy store’ with so much going around him. He also said Google is more of a balanced space where work essentially meets fun. “Everyone out here wants to be you Sundar”, said Harsha. To which Mr. Sundar said, “One must do something they’re excited by. We all have many opportunities to reinvent ourselves, and we should keep on trying. In silicon valley, people start their own companies and even if they fail, they wear it as a badge of honour.” He emphasised the importance of taking risk!

He also said that he’s an ardent fan of football and follows Barcelona every now and then. His favourite player is Messi (which did upset the Ronaldo fans!). While he was young he would wake up in the middle of the night to watch matches, driving his mom crazy. The students got a chance to ask questions from Mr. Pichai too. One of the girls asked if he ever felt incompetent working with the more talented people of the company. To which he humbly said that it’s always great to work with people who know better than you because insecurity pushes you forward in life.

When asked about how his vision for Google is different from that of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, he replied that they all share a lot in common. Google has given flight to a lot of things and he wishes to make technology the one stop solution to every problem. He also said that India is an amazingly vast land where trends of future emerge and they are now investing a lot more here than before.

A video question came asking him why Android version names are not named after Indian desserts, to which he laughingly said that they’ll keep that in mind next time they launch another version. The session ended with a rapid fire round where Harsha asked Pichai about his 12th standard percentage. The CEO said in a witty manner that it wasn’t enough to get him into SRCC.

Before the arrival of Mr. Pichai, there was a performance by the drummers group D’Frens who made the whole audience play their drums in the Mexican wave fashion with their infectious energy. Another band of six vocalists from Mumbai, Raga Tripping entertained the audience by producing music without any instruments.

All and all the event was on a hugely grand scale with Google being the perfect host. The Starwars headsets goodies for all left the audience a bit too happy.

So did you ‘Ask Sundar’?

Tanya Agarwal

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It might be a little late for writing your obituary, but almost after a week since your demise, the hollowness has just begun to sink in. Dear Google Reader, thanks for being the information aggregator that I always required. Thank you for being there, and specially for being a Google product.

When your daddy wrote this in a blog post, I almost felt that retire could be replaced with kill. The fact that I will never see my subscriptions in the Google Reader interface was just a change one wasn’t used to.

“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.”

Now that you are gone, its strange that with so many alternatives buzzing in the Internet sphere that people hardly notice a void. They might not be Google, but they still work and surprisingly come packed in intuitive interfaces. And then your demise also created a new category called the ‘Google Reader replacement’ and a huge number of developers willingly went for the kill. Almost dying Digg saw the scope in the market and launched the Digg Reader. Established AOL announced plans of an AOL Reader. Feedly and BlogLovin have already been there since long.

Bread and butter to many and a reader’s paradise, with you RSS had been a companion. It had been there earlier but hadn’t been recognised. You gave the phenomenon visibility, thank you for that.

Like many application based services that come and go in this fast changing web world, you my friend lived a long fruitful life of eight years. In today’s world of social media dominance, I wonder whether RSS is becoming a shrinking market. I shared your loss with a few friends, and well the major response said, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” Sadly, the past three years of social media dominance have taken over your prowess. Twitter majorly, might be the one to blame. RSS is all about quick and light updates for news and information that matters to you. Twitter, integrated multimedia into the system, subscriptions in the form of accounts you could follow and everything in a constantly updating ‘feed’. I am not referring to it as a complete RSS alternative, it just happens to be doing a lot of damage to RSS’ market.

As a blogger, reader and Internet lover, I will miss you. We shall continue to respect you for what you gave to the Internet. You might leave us as a service, but will continue to stay in our emotional cache and mental history forever and ever. May you rest in peace and ever eternal online glory.

On 18th September, Google organized its pre-placement talk in LSR. Being one of the most sought after and innovative companies, Google had ‘do cool things that matter’ as its theme this year to attract prospective applicants in their pre- placement talk. The talk was led by Ms. Shwetambari, a senior executive at Google, India, and the talk began with a little quiz on Google and its products, to see how ‘Googly’ the LSR girls were. The ones who gave the correct answers received goodies from Google, and with a brilliant start, Google managed to capture the attention of all the girls from the various departments of LSR, sitting in that small room, dreaming about working for a company like Google in the future. Apart from departments like Economics and B.com, which are standard departments sitting for placements, the Google pre-placement talk saw students ranging from departments like English to Political science. The job profile offered was the business analyst program, which entailed tasks like reviewing Google advertisements, servicing global small and medium business customers, etc. Apart from these, the program also trained the employee in selling skills and business management. The employee would also learn how to use the Google Adwords product. The pay package offered was good, considering the fact that a company like Google was employing fresh graduates. The employees would have to work and learn with Google for two years, before they could move on to other job profiles. One thing extremely special about Google was- its emphasis on employee satisfaction, and Ms. Shwetambari kept stating throughout the presentation that Google did not believe in binding unhappy employees to the company, and if an employee wished to leave, they could do so, without facing any penalty. In fact, they could also keep the ‘gift’ stocks that they are given at the beginning of their tenure in office (considering the fact that Google stocks currently value at around 270$!). Google also seemed like a really ‘cool’ place to work in, with parties being thrown at the end of every week, and guest speakers like Lady Gaga coming to sing and speak to the employees. The office would be located in Hyderabad and Gurgaon, and Google also offered free accommodation for two weeks in a guesthouse, to give time to the employee to settle in the new city. The facilities and bonuses offered by Google were also very lucrative, and after the talk, the first round of the placement process was held. It was a written round, in which all the candidates had to complete a quantitative and verbal analysis test in 40 minutes, and a writing test in 30 minutes. The test by and large tested the aptitude of the students, and there was a round of positive feedback after the entire session got over. The results are now eagerly awaited for the girls who managed to crack the test and move towards the next round of placement in the ‘cool’ place to be: Google. Do cool things that matter.  ]]>