Career Path of a People Programs and Operations Lead at Alphabet

Working experience-wise, I started fairly young. My introduction to working was lots of babysitting in the neighborhood from a pretty young age. As I got older, towards the end of high school, I was probably doing hostess work at a restaurant in town.

I grew up in a fairly small town in Northern California. The summer before college, a friend's dad, who was a doctor, needed some files transcribed into digital. So I think I did some office work, things like that.

When I went to college, I also worked through it. During summers, I worked retail. I worked at Gap, which was a great experience for learning how to deal with people. While in school, I worked part-time as a receptionist at our university's financial aid office. It wasn't many hours, but it was nice to have some experience and a little money.

For school, I initially intended to become a therapist, as I was super interested in that idea. I majored in psychology and really enjoyed it. However, about halfway through, I started to feel like it might be a hard job. The idea of being an individual worker with patients, taking on their problems, and working through challenges, made me want to work alone.

At that time, I did a study abroad program and had an internship in a classroom, with about fourth graders. I absolutely loved it. Kids were still excited about school, not dreading going. I really enjoyed it and decided to minor in education. I added that minor around junior or senior year and thought I would become a teacher and get my master's after school.

I continued to do internship work in college for classrooms, working in different ones to meet the required hours. That was a big focus as I got ready to graduate. After graduating, I was really just looking for any job. I knew I had to pay for school if I wanted to become a teacher, so I just needed a job.

I worked a bunch of different temp jobs for a while, like a few days at some Sephora event and then a few days at a shipping logistics company. It was very random. I ended up getting a job as a receptionist at a venture capital company. This was my introduction into the tech space in Silicon Valley. I grew up there but hadn't thought much about it.

That experience really opened up my interest in working in the tech space. I decided not to go to school. Some friends became teachers, but it felt less appealing to me. It was kind of a classic trap where I wanted to move out, live in San Francisco, and afford rent. I was already working, so I just kind of stuck with it.

Continuing my career path, I worked as a receptionist at that company. After some time, I moved into an executive assistant role, supporting the partners with scheduling, meetings, and backend tasks. From there, I moved to New York and got a job in a similar capacity. It was an assistant job, but it was kind of an "all-hands-on-deck" role at a small company called Sidewalk Labs, which was an Alphabet company. I was really wearing a lot of hats.

From there, I transitioned into a people ops, HR role. They needed someone to pick up all the backend pieces, like benefits and employee relations issues. Someone needed to talk to people, so I started stepping in. Before I knew it, I was on that career path. I worked at that company for about six or seven years. I then went to another tech company in regenerative agriculture for about a year and a half.

I then found myself in my current position, where I've done a bunch of different things in the people ops, HR field. Now I've landed specifically on people programs, with more of a focus after having tried all the different pieces of HR.