Katie’s no stranger to working hard and breaking a sweat – she spends much of her spare time on and around soccer fields, both as a player and coach. So when her first application for a job at Google was unsuccessful, she brushed off the mud and got back on the field to try again.
It was during a computer science degree at the University of Adelaide that Katie scored a 12-week STEP (Summer Trainee Engineering Program) internship at Google in Sydney. “I thought, this is actually pretty cool, I want to stick around,” she says.
She followed that up with another 12-week software engineering internship the next year – but when a soccer scholarship to the United States fell through, Katie realised she hadn’t properly prepared for the process involved in converting her Google internship into a full-time gig. Katie went back to Adelaide to complete an Honours year, and applied for loads of software engineering jobs – mainly to prepare herself for a second attempt at getting that dream job at Google. And her hard work paid off.
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Katie now works in the Google Photos team as a software engineer on the Application Programming Interface (API) which, she explains, “with users’ consent, gives third-party developers access to Google Photos to do even more cool things with them” such as digital photo frames.
Katie reckons “everyone should get into tech!” – especially more women. “There’s always something exciting happening,” she says.
Katie’s career and study pathway
>> Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours), University of Adelaide
>> STEP intern, Google
>> Software Engineering Intern, Google
>> Software Engineer, Google
This article was brought to you in partnership with Google. It originally appears in Careers with STEM: Code 2019.
Author: Gemma Chilton
Gemma is an author and editor and past Managing Editor of Careers with STEM magazine. She has previously worked as Digital Managing Editor at Australian Geographic and a staff writer at Cosmos science magazine.
