2 min readApr 3, 2017
- Google is not paying for the housing. As the article implies, and other articles state, Howard is covering that for students.
- Google internships pay upwards of $30/hour (I’d know, as I had one). It would make more sense for Google to actually have these students do internships, and then pay them for that work, than it would for them to do this program. This is just students paying normal tuition to to take summer classes on the other side of the country. This isn’t something that will help them develop further than normal schooling would.
- While the scaling argument is valid (when I first heard about this program, I thought it made a lot of sense in the context of making the GIR’s lives easier), it misses the point. The original program was meant to target CS beginners in the Intro class (which tends to be mostly made up of non-majors who are interested in learning more). This made a lot of sense, given that having a real tech professional leading a beginner course could serve as a good way of convincing people to change their major. If this summer program were meant for freshmen who were unsure of what they wanted to do, I would have no complaints. But this is meant for juniors and seniors (people who are very close to completing their degrees, and should be interning in prep for transitioning to full-time during their summers). Which makes this absurd.
- I know Google is using this as a recruiting pipeline. That much is obvious. But they’re trying to hide that fact by acting like this somehow benefits anyone other than them (and the students they hire), which it doesn’t. No one can write this experience down on their resumes.
- I was in the pilot of this program while I attended Howard (back when it made more sense), and I’ve talked to current Howard students about this. Overall, they also think it’s poorly implemented, and that it makes them look incompetent/unhireable. The program was created without consulting students to see if it was something they even wanted, and I have reason to believe it won’t last very long.
- Unlike professors, GIRs are operating outside of the scope of what they were hired to do — they are literally being engineers, recruiters, and professors, simultaneously. And while, sure, this is volunteer work, they shouldn’t face negative repercussions (having their engineering performance reviews suffer) for going above and beyond.
