GCIT Professional Advising Activity Series 4:

Finding Your “Why?”, What Motivates You in Your Career? A Talk about Working for the Tech Giant Google

Sandy Chen (陳容歆), current head of YouTube large partnerships, Greater China, GCIT professional advisor and NCCU alumnus spoke to a group of 40 GCIT students on November the 21st, 2022. This speech is the fourth in the program’s professional advisor activity series. Chen’s colleague Tony Chang (張鈺東), also an advisor from Google Taiwan, participated in the event and introduced the professional advising collaboration between Google Taiwan and GCIT. Chen talked at length about her long career working all over the world for various companies and also about the inner workings of YouTube.

Chen shared with the students her life story and how she came to be where she is today. She talked a lot about finding your “why”, or in other words, what motivates you. Chen explained that she was inspired from a young age to explore and this led her to work all over the world. She was able to share with students valuable insights that she gained from these travels, including how to find work abroad and adapt to different companies, workplaces and cultures, etc. One piece of advice stood out, however, and that was the idea of learning agility. Especially in the ever-changing tech industry, one can only succeed if they are willing to learn as part of their job. One will never be one hundred percent ready for any job, but someone willing to put in the effort to learn can succeed.

In the latter part of the event, Chen delved into the world of YouTube, a topic that many GCIT students were eager to learn about. She discussed YouTube’s business model, which is, like other tech companies, to keep the user’s attention on their platform. YouTube does this by supporting its “creators” to generate quality content so that they drive traffic to the platform and rewarding said creators with an innovative advertisement-sharing model. Chen proceeded to talk about the well-known but mysterious YouTube algorithm, the part of YouTube that is responsible for recommending content to its audience. This portion of the talk was quite valuable for students in the audience that perhaps aspire to be content creators on YouTube or gain visibility for their company or organization.

Chen finished off the lecture by taking questions from the audience; some GCIT students had specific questions about how to make YouTube content more successful while others had general career-related queries. Some especially notable career advice she gave was: you will never know if any job is right for you unless you try, listen to your gut feeling and be open and always willing to learn.

Article credit: Charles Cook

Photo credit: Raksina Pongdumbun

Resource: GCIT facebook