10 Career Tips From Silicon Valley Terps
QUEST Students Bring Back Advice, Connections From Alums at Top Tech Companies Over Spring Break
From emphasizing the importance of collaboration to challenging students to try new ideas, UMD alums working in Silicon Valley offer career advice for Terps.
Illustrations and infographic by Valerie Morgan; photos courtesy of QUEST
Jack Campbell ’27 thought his team’s pitch at Meta headquarters for a new product might win each of them a branded water bottle.
But after they proposed an app to get people outdoors to build a virtual piece of art collaboratively at local parks and won first place against fellow UMD classmates, their hosts brought out some of the company’s $300 Quest 3S headsets and $329 Ray-Ban AI glasses.
QUEST students with the Instagram logo at the Meta campus
“We all went insane,” said computer science major Campbell, who will be interning at Meta’s Menlo Park, Calif., campus this summer. “It was amazing.”
That was just one of the perks of a whirlwind Spring Break trip to the Bay Area for students in the QUEST (Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams) Honors program class called “Design and Innovation in Silicon Valley.”
They visited University of Maryland alums working at 10 tech companies, including giants Google and Apple, household names like DoorDash as well as startups like Nuro, a self-driving car company.
“We want students to gain hands-on experience and to learn about the real world and what the tech industry is like by actually talking to alumni there and getting networking opportunities,” said QUEST Assistant Director Jessica Roffe who led the trip, the first offered since the pandemic.
QUEST brings together students from the Robert H. Smith School of Business, the A. James Clark School of Engineering and the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences to work in multidisciplinary teams and solve problems as consultants for local nonprofits, startups and even major corporations like Lockheed Martin. The program is one example of how UMD is reimagining teaching and learning in classrooms and communities.
Nuro Software Engineer Paul Lathrop ’19 (right) shows QUEST students an autonomous delivery vehicle
In Silicon Valley, several companies hosted mini pitch competitions, while others took students on tours, gave presentations and took questions about recruiting. Trip highlights included getting a 61st-floor view of San Francisco from Salesforce Tower; going behind-the-scenes at Nuro to see how the company builds sensors and switchboards for its delivery robots and self-driving cars; and hopping on Google’s colorful bikes.
Over the week, the UMD Alumni Association sponsored a welcome brunch and a happy hour mixer where students connected with even more grads, and QUEST hosted a dinner that featured alums, including one from the program’s first cohort, Brian Marquardt ’96, now at Google.
“This was something I knew I could never do on my own. Getting to see the insides of these huge tech companies and meeting people who work there was a really unique opportunity,” said mechanical engineering major Priya Nayak ’27. She also loved bonding with her cohort, including a long (and foggy) morning hike from their hotel to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Check out nuggets of wisdom from Terp alums across Silicon Valley by clicking on the company names or logos in the graphic below:
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