MBA Journal: From Google to UCLA

I began to think about next steps. I knew I needed to shape my career early on; later, there would be far less time

By Yael Davidowitz-Neu

My parents always taught me to be an independent thinker. Whenever possible, they allowed me to make my own choices—even if that meant I might make mistakes along the way. When I was age 7, my mom gave me a budget for school clothes and allowed me to decide how best to allocate it. While I spent an entire year dressed from head to toe in purple, I also learned to align a budget appropriately against long-term priorities.

If I was a decisive child, I graduated from college more confident in my thinking and ideas. Quirky, creative, and unafraid to color outside the lines, I had much to offer an employer, but I was a terrible fit for a role within the typical corporation. I grew up 30 minutes north of Manhattan, and though my friends were lining up jobs in the city and renting almost comically small rooms in shared apartments, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. Dressing in stockings and heels on a daily basis and heading to a job at a Wall Street firm, or even a Madison Avenue ad agency, held limited appeal.

Despite my clarity about what I did not want to do, I had little insight into the type of job that would make me happy. Armed with heavy student loans, I did not have the luxury of being a lady of leisure while I tried to “find myself.” Instead, I moved back into my mother’s house and took on a temporary role working at a small startup in Union Square.

FORTUITOUS VISIT

While the epiphany I was waiting for did not surface in either the bustle of Union Square or in the relative serenity of my childhood bedroom, I received a visit from a college friend. She was working at Google in the San Francisco area and described it as being “unlike anything you could imagine.” I had read about the many perks Google offered its employees, but what appealed to me was not free lunches or gyms located onsite. Rather, it was that I wanted to be among creative, smart people who would see my quirkiness as an asset rather than a deficit.

A few months later I was living in San Francisco and working at Google’s headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley. I was given the rather ambiguous title of “advertising associate,” which was, in actuality, something of a glorified customer service representative. Strangely, I did not care. Even if I was in a customer service function, Google was a company rife with opportunities to innovate and shake up the status quo.

As predicted, Google was indeed a place where I could be successful. In the four and a half years I spent there, I worked in three official functions and on dozens of projects related to the monetization of AdWords, Google’s advertising product. Although I was engaged in my work, at some point I naturally began to think about next steps. Particularly as a woman who intends to have both a career and a family, I knew I needed to shape my career early on; later, there would be far less time.

At some point, I decided that my long-term career goal was to manage and own a boutique consulting firm focused on brand strategy. This stems from both my fascination with all things brand related—the assignments I enjoyed most at Google were always those that gave me the opportunity to work with advertisers on their broader marketing strategy—and my longtime fantasy of being my own boss.

GRANDFATHER’S ADVICE

When I thought about how to achieve this, business school was an option, but one I quickly dismissed. It was too mainstream, antithetical to the way I saw myself. Why would I go to business school when I could be getting real-world experience?