Dayo Owoyemi ’15 is one of nearly a dozen Bryant alumni who work for Google, the near-ubiquitous $75-billion tech giant that has topped Fortune Magazine’s list of the country’s “Best Companies to Work For” for six consecutive years. As a Google employee, he makes big decisions, knowing his Bryant education has given him the expertise, experience, and confidence to back them up.
“At Google, you know that everything that you’re doing is going to have a direct and huge impact,” says Owoyemi, who, as an Account Strategist with Google Marketing Solutions, manages a multimillion-dollar portfolio of more than 200 small business clients per quarter and provides strategic advice on how to make the most of their advertising investment with Google. “Everything that you’re doing plays out in the millions or the billions scale so you have a huge responsibility and you have to own that.”
“What makes Google unique is the people,” says William Kelaher ’12, a Strategic Partner Manager at Google who works with eCommerce sites. “Everyone has everyone else’s back and everyone is good at what they do.”
Gian Spicuzza ’11 agrees. “It’s a very open and fostering environment at Google,” says the Engineering Program Manager who works on Android security. “I feel very good about giving feedback and challenging conventional wisdom if I feel that something can be improved.”
Success 2.0
That devotion to innovation is a key element of Google culture. “If a certain model or marketing strategy that we’re using has been working for so long and people are reluctant to change it I tell them ‘We can flip this thing on its head and get the 2.0 version of what we’re getting right now,’” says Owoyemi. “That mindset has helped me be successful at Google.”
He credits his Bryant Management classes with helping him develop that mindset. “I think the management classes I took are some of the most valuable classes I’ve taken in life,” says Owoyemi, an Actuarial Science major. “My Global Foundations of Business class taught me so much about how business owners think, about how they market, how finance works.”
For Kelaher, a Marketing major, Bryant’s integration of business and the liberal arts helped him get ahead. “While the business classes provided a solid core,” he says, “I’d say some of the liberal arts classes that provided a more worldly perspective were the most important.”
“At Bryant I learned to look at things at a larger scale, at sort of a hundred feet from the ground,” states Spicuzza, who majored in Applied Economics. “That’s really helped me at Google because when we release a product we’re not just releasing a product that I think is cool, it’s a product that will be used by people from so many different backgrounds around the world.”
