Ben Cole, far left, and fellow Google interns show off their entry in the office cubicle decorating contest.
With a deadline looming, Cornell junior Benjamin Cole and his fellow Google interns worked frantically through the weekend. They downed energy snacks to stay on pace and focused. Come Monday morning, their project was complete: a six-foot tall Ferris Wheel made out of K’NEX—a construction toy—built just in time for the office cubicle decorating contest.
But Cole’s summer internship with the search giant—his second at Google—wasn’t all fun and games. He focused on user experience research for Google Docs programs and the company’s ad platforms. From the company’s Manhattan office, he ran user studies and collaborated with engineers, researchers, and designers to shape different products.
“I helped Google understand what its users want and need, both in terms of product features and user interface issues,” he said.
Cole, an information sciences major, enjoys investigating questions about the computational, psychological, and social issues spawned by the Internet. Google turned out to be the ideal place to explore those interests.
“The biggest thing I learned,” Cole said, “was the difference between academic and industrial research. In academia, we take our painstaking time to make sure that we're absolutely accurate, precise, and of course, statistically significant. At Google, research needs to keep up with the agile development cycles of engineering teams. This means that sometimes you only have a couple weeks of turn around for a study.”
Cole also had a brush with fame during a visit to Google’s Mountain View headquarters. One day, during a 28-mile bike ride to a Santa Cruz amusement park, Cole ended up chatting with Larry Page, one of the company’s co-founders.
“It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized I had been making small talk with one of my all-time heroes,” he said. “After the shock wore off, I emailed him and let him know that I’d be happy to be his biking buddy if he was ever in New York.”
— Marissa Fessenden