Google adventure

Hi. I’m Santosh.I.  Currently, I’m a Second year BSc. graduate at Government Science College. Bengaluru.

The Google program was like an adventure that can never be forgotten.  

As I recollect the very first day of my visit to Google, I see myself sitting with all other mentees, mentors and organizers, with a  lot of happiness, enjoying that I was in a big company like Google. And when they handed over “htc Google Nexus phone”, I was delighted and was so excited that I didn’t wait for any instructions to start using it. Soon the first day came to an end but not the fun. Because, it had just ‘BEGUN’.

I have so many things to share that if I start sharing everything at once, I’ll get confused. So, let me put everything into parts.

First of all, the things which we (my co-mentee and I) learnt from our mentor. Rajat, our mentor for four weeks, was young, energetic and resourceful. With him we never had a feeling that he was teaching or dictating something. He guided us to learn for ourselves and made things self-discoverable. The things we learnt included the effective use of Google Drive(Google docs), Google+, hangouts. I had thought that Google Drive is the same as Microsoft office tools. But in fact they were really different. Features like publishing, asking for comments, sharing and seeing the history of the changes made by the sharer looked very fascinating. And the most interesting one was to store data online, which is not at all confined to single device. He also helped us in building our own resumes, which we indeed enjoyed. And one more thing that really inspired me was this thought from our mentor” Learning happens best in groups” i.e., by sharing. Until then I had a belief that knowledge shared is gone forever. So, I would like to sincerely thank our mentor and would wish to stay connected forever to learn more things.

Secondly, the mobile. ‘OMG’ Everything was like a dream. Having the latest technology phone and free 3G internet connectivity made me fly without wings. I used to feel happy watching pranks, get inspired watching inspirational speeches, relax by listening to music, all on YouTube. And my Google searches included visiting places virtually without moving a muscle. And to find answer to some of my questions like for example: “How to be safe on the internet?” or “How to connect desktop with mobile for internet?” etc...   I also saw a huge change in my facebook account. For more than a year, the number of friends I had were limited to 20-25 friends.  But in the last one month, it has increased  up to 70-75 friends. An increase of 50 friends! For someone else this number could be negligible but for me it was huge.

Another important thing that I want to share is the video I took using my mobile. As a part of the Google program, we were told to do an assignment. The assignment was to create a video of anything of our interest and upload it to the YouTube. So, I took a video recording of the full moon at 3’o clock in the morning by shaking the cell phone itself. After little editing, I uploaded it to the YouTube and my assignment was done. At the end, my video was selected as one of the three best videos. I felt like jumping in the air and shouting. Here are the winning videos-

My video:

Keerthy's algebra video:

Gayathri's palanguli video:

Thirdly, I wish to write about the other mentees I met there. I befriended almost everyone. Most of them were engineering students, and some were from commerce backgrounds. When I was in PUC (12th class), I didn’t write Common Entrance Test (CET) for engineering courses, because, I always thought that engineering courses were only for high-class people and not for middle or low-class people i.e., not for me. But meeting my co-mentees brought about a change in my perception. My fellow mates don’t belong to these higher-classes, but they are doing engineering. They taught me a lesson that one should always think beyond his/her limits.

During the Google program, along with the fun of Google, we also had a taste of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B). I was feeling lucky being at IIM-B, because the famous 3-idiots film was shot here. Some of us mentees worked together on a small project relating to “Global Accessibility Awareness Day”. For this we had video rehearsing. To watch how we had fun and how it went on, please see below. 

(Drum roll)We have come to an end of my first blogpost!

Before I go, I would like to thank few people.

First the people of Mentor Together.

Nischal Sir:  My very first mentor, who referred me to this program. If he hadn’t thought about me, I wouldn’t have experienced this much fun.

Arundhuti ma’am: The person who was responsible for making all  of us 20 students feel lucky and  experience as much fun as I had, if not more.

 And of course, friends and Google organizers and engineers who made it a grand success.

Thank you ^Google everyone

{Read as “Thank you to the power of Google, (Google means 1 followed by hundred zeroes) everyone”}