Senior Project Leads to Google Internship

The next time you get on Google, search Ben Maurer`s name. In a matter of days, Maurer, who graduated from Hawken in 2005 and is currently finishing his freshman year as a Computer Science major at Carnegie Mellon University, will wake up in Mountain View, California and begin a summer internship with the Google AdWords team - the folks who engineer, for instance, the FTD floral ads that accompany your Google search results for \"flowers.\" Maurer pursued the highly competitive paid internship at the encouragement of one of his Carnegie Mellon professors, but it was his Senior project at Hawken that helped seal the deal. \"Throughout the process I was actually fairly worried about the fact that I was a (college) freshman,\" he says. \"Google accepts very few interns and is extremely selective. It turned out to be experience that helped me get the job - I`d been interning for the previous two summers for Novell [software] in Boston, and I spent my Hawken Senior Project there working on programming.\" In fact, with the help of his professor, Maurer`s resume moved through the HR system at Google so quickly that the internship was confirmed within two weeks of his initial application. And, while he doesn`t yet know exactly what he`ll be doing for AdWords, Maurer has already contributed his talents to the creation of http://gintern.net/, which he describes as \"a site to aggregate the blogs of Google interns.\" He designed the look of the page, which offers incoming Google interns an online community that incorporates a number of Google products and services. Maurer encourages future Hawken seniors \"with an idea of what they`d like to do as a career to use the Senior project as a chance to get experience, because it can be very valuable on a resume.\" And that, in turn, can lead to the perks associated with a company that has Google`s reputation for innovative employee incentives - a fact that is not lost on Maurer. \"Apparently the food at Google is *VERY* good,\" he reports, \"and employees say that they would never go out to eat. There`s a huge drink selection; if I try a new drink every day of my internship - about 12 weeks - I`ll never have to drink the same thing twice.\"