2009 – 2013

RPI photo leads to my first full-time job

by Brian Nock

In October 2009 as a freshman at RPI, I attended the FanFest events of Reunion & Homecoming weekend, had my face painted with "Why Not Change the World?" and wandered around with a collection of RPI gear. A photographer took my photo, which perhaps changed the course of my life, if not my academic and professional career. The photo was used the following year by RPI to promote Reunion & Homecoming weekend in print and digital advertising, and led to me being introduced to staff [Geoff Seber] in the Office of Alumni Engagement (then Alumni Relations) through someone in First Year Experience [Janelle Fayette]. This led to a series of other events, including joining Red & White Student Organization, working with Federal Work-Study in the Office of Alumni Engagement, founding weR, and more. While working part-time, one of my tasks was to create photo name tags for the new members of the Fifty Year Club that registered for Reunion & Homecoming. Portraits from their senior yearbook would be scanned, then individually cropped, saved with their name and class year in a common file naming convention, and uploaded to a nametag template in Microsoft Word. I found the process to be very time consuming and used some kind of macro or other automation to significantly improve the process speed and quality. I can't recall the specifics beyond being grateful as the computer worked quickly while I sat watching. When it came time to look for full-time work, I had a series of conversations with Google for an operations job and they were interested in my experience with process improvement. I had the perfect example with my Fifty Year Club photo nametag macro, and was glad to share it. A few weeks (and several interviews) later, I accepted a job offer at Google and remain happily employed there 11 years later. And that's the story of how a photo taken by Kris Qua at Reunion & Homecoming Weekend ended up with me working at Google. Thanks, RPI!