Students Engage with Google Employees through Career Virtual Panel

On Feb. 27, the Gordon Career Center hosted a Google Career Virtual Panel featuring Wesleyan alumni who offered insight on their roles in sales, business, product management, marketing, legal issues, and other roles at Google.

The panel was assembled by Sherry Liang ’20, who completed a WEShadow at Google last winter, and Peer Career Advisor Esmye Lytle ’21.

Speakers included:

Aaron Stoertz ’03: Stoertz graduated with a BA in English. Since then he worked in conservation biology, public health, and international health policy at the World Health Organization before landing in tech, where he’s worked his way into a position as a product manager at Google Health.

Terry Wei ’07: Wei has 13 years of experience in public relations and communications. She currently leads communications for Waze, the world’s leading crowdsourced navigation app. Previously, Wei was head of public relations at Squarespace and managed product communications at Mercedes-Benz. Originally from California, Wei studied English at Wesleyan and graduated in 2007.

Kwabea O’Brien ’09: Prior to graduating from Wesleyan, O’Brien interned in the AAAA’s Multicultural Advertising Intern Program. The program works to provide opportunities in the advertising industry to ethnic minorities and underrepresented groups. During her internship program, she discovered her love of working in advertising. She then held jobs at several major advertising agencies, including DraftFCB, Zenith Media, and Horizon Media, working on digital media. In 2015, O’Brien received her MBA in marketing and media management from Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business. From there, she worked for American Express in the global merchant and network services division, where she was responsible for marketing to consumer card members. She’s currently an agency lead at Google in its Global Business Organization, where she fosters relationships and executes strategic partnership plans for C-Level agency executives.

Chet Devaskar ’04: Devaskar is an experienced film and television lawyer who works at YouTube. His work primarily focuses on negotiating contracts relating to YouTube “Originals” (i.e., video and music content that is exclusively available for viewing on YouTube). A few examples of YouTube Original programs that he has recently worked on include the hit show Cobra Kai (based on the “Karate Kid” movie franchise), Liza on Demand (starring the YouTube influencer Liza Koshy), and several music-themed shows starring artists such as Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, and Demi Lovato.

Cecil Apostol ’08: Apostol is a product marketing manager on the Agency Management and Product Area Partnerships team. His team manages Google’s relationships with the creative agencies who produce all the ads and commercials seen on TV, in magazines, and on the web. Prior to this role, he spent eight years in ad sales and managed a $200M portfolio of Google’s largest B2B advertisers. In his spare time, he serves as the chief of staff for the Filipino Googler Network, where he manages chapter leads across the world and assists the leadership group in building an overall strategy for the group. Apostol graduated with a BA in English and American studies.

Sadasia McCutchen ’17: McCutchen joined Google in 2017 and is the growth lead at CapitalG, where she helps portfolio companies navigate their most business-critical challenges as they scale. Previously, McCutchen held several business-critical roles in Google’s People Operations organization. She was the lead analyst on Google’s 2019 Diversity Annual Report, the most public dataset the company releases on culture, inclusion, diversity, and hiring. Her data expertise informed and measured company-wide people strategies, government reporting, and business OKRs. McCutchen also managed global operations for Google’s extended workforce (all temps, vendors, and contractors). McCutchen graduated from Wesleyan with a BA in African American studies, government, and data analytics.

Adam Brudnick ’13: Brudnick is a senior associate on Google’s Business Operations and Strategy team, which is Google’s internal strategy consulting group that works across product areas within both Google and Alphabet at large. Before Google, he worked in clean energy at the New York Power Authority, and as a consultant for McKinsey in New York. He has an MBA from the University of California—Berkeley, and graduated from Wesleyan with a dual degree in music and mathematics-economics.