Google = Free Food + Disneyland = Heaven on Earth?

I apologize for a little break. I've been busy living this week :) This is the first time since Tuesday I have some time to stop and write. There are many things I want to share with you so please be patient with me. I'll take it step by step. There's too much going on :)

Trip
As a part of the openlab Summer Student program, there are several visits to companies and research institutes in Switzerland and France. I didn't know that in advance and I was so happy to find out we will go to Zurich to visit several places including Google.

The visits to Open Systems and ETH Zurich were also interesting and I enjoyed them both a lot. However, everybody keeps asking about Google and I have not enough time to go into detail about everything. If you're really interested in something else, please email me or something.

Free Food
How was the day we spent at Google then? Epic! Of course it was great. One of the highlights was having breakfast and lunch there. The food was actually pretty healthy. And there was so much of it! It feels good to be taken care of like this.

I loved the fruits and didn't have enough time to have ice cream, because we wanted to try sliding down the slide from the floor above into the cafeteria :) It felt like a playground combined with a candy store or something.

Disneyland
I actually found some pictures from the office. The description of the workplace as "surreal" is pretty fitting in my opinion. There is food every 30 meters so that you can have a snack any time you want to. There are chill out areas, sofas, massage chairs, little gardens, play rooms, gyms, game rooms,... I cannot even remember all of it. Just follow the link above to check it out. It's really impressive.

We had a great guide, one of Google summer interns, Elizabeth from California. Thank you so much for the great tour! She handled us (a bunch of crazy Greeks and other international guys) pretty well :)

Heaven on Earth?
I got asked multiple times. Do I want to work there? I mean Google is just an amazing place to work at. No doubt. However, to really enjoy working there, you had better be passionate about what you do. I think this is true in general, about anything you do. The point here is you won't get to work at Google unless you are really excited about your work anyway.

So if you are the right kind of geek who spends their free time solving programming puzzles, just go for it and I think you will have a blast working here. On the other hand, even all the slides in the world won't help you if you don't do what you love.

So for now, I don't want to work at Google. I want to travel and do as little programming as possible. I am super excited about working as an intern at McKinsey Prague next spring. This is another dream of mine that came true in the last few months... Dreams are coming true so fast I can hardly keep up. Let's see what happens next :)