Watch Out Google: How PSE is Preparing Students for Success

Watch Out Google: How PSE is Preparing Students for Success

By: Claire Fink

Universities and high schools tend to veer toward teaching the same material the same way to the same students. After doing so, they expect these students to achieve the same high results. Large and successful companies are veering away from hiring recent graduates with just a high GPA, or experience solely limited to academics. Although these act as contributors to a strong resume, Google will be the first to tell you that they are not looking for someone who can ace a test- they are looking for much more substance than that. 

This correlates directly with a brotherhood like Pi Sigma Epsilon. PSE is an organization with people that fuel, encourage, and enable one another. Businesses are looking to hire emerging leaders, humorous personality types, and collaborators. A 4.0 GPA is excellent, but will it get you hired? Probably not. 

Innovation is based on finding new methods, but we quickly realize we cannot do this alone. We can study and take tests alone, but the most successful career paths and companies are focused on one’s ability to collaborate and want the success of others just as much as they want their own. 

In one of my Entrepreneurship classes, we discussed an article based on who Google is aiming to hire. They mentioned that they want to hire employees with “Googleyness”. Googleyness is the ability to be the emerging leader, not just the person who takes charge. Emerging leaders are those who empathize with the situation and know when and how they are needed. They are constantly thinking of ways they can help the greater good, and they are consistently making sacrifices for what they are passionate about. Googleyness also means someone that is funny. Trying to fit the norms of what you think people want to hear is equivalent to taking 10 steps backward in the hiring process. The more you embrace things that make you laugh, chances are this will project onto others. 

These skills and tendencies happen to make up touchpoints we see in sales and marketing all the time. Someone who can collaborate, someone who is funny, someone who is an emerging leader, and someone you can trust! - who wouldn’t buy a product from a company with an employee foundation like that? 

PSE develops these sales and marketing skills, not just the surface-level ones, but the ones that allow us to collaborate and enable each other. Moving forward, I have the utmost confidence that PSE will make up the next generation of high-demand hires. 3 words: Watch out Google.