This month, Mohamed Abdalkader ’14 starts work with Google, the dream employer of every young computer scientist. Abdalkader will serve as a Computer Science Academy (CSA) Resident, in their year-long post-college apprenticeship program based at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. The program is designed to train the next generation of leaders in technology, by “bridging the gap between academia and industry.”
The Computer Science Academy program matches up participants with mentors from Google’s staff, and includes both classroom learning and hands-on coding work on real-scale company projects. Abdalkader was a computer science major at Haverford, and previously did an internship as a software development engineer with Amazon.com in Seattle. He feels as though Haverford’s Computer Science Department laid the foundation for the work he will do with Google. “Most of the problems that I solved in the interviews were directly based on concepts that we learned in class,” he says.
Abdalkader is thrilled about his upcoming year in California, and believes Google will help him establish a career in tech. “Being at Google will expose me to cutting-edge technologies and will allow me to network with some of the best engineers in the field,” he says.
—Kelsey Ryan ’14
“Where They’re Headed” is a blog series reporting on the post-Haverford plans of members of the Class of 2014.