Tori Zellerhoff
Today we all made our way to Silicon Valley from pre-spring break trips all across the country. I came to the sunny 80 degree California day from Seattle, where I went skiing yesterday, so it was a bit of a weather change. I flew into San Jose (SJC) where I met up with Sarah Prezek, Nancy Nguyen, and Ethan Sauer to split an Uber to our hotel. Our driver happened to work at Accenture, which was funny because we will all be working at consulting firms after graduation (Avanade, Deloitte, and Booz Allen Hamilton). As he was driving he told us all about their innovation lab and pointed out cool companies that we passed on the way. When we arrived at the hotel he even took our picture.
Surprisingly, everyone made it here on time without any major flight delays or cancellations. Everyone is very excited to be in California and for all the opportunities we will have this week. We started off with a great dinner at Cibo with all 60 of us (42 ESTEEM students, 9 juniors, 4 MBA students, and 5 ESTEEM staff)! We already were able to meet Richard Pivnicka, who is a three time Notre Dame alumnus and an entrepreneur himself with his latest development being an audio device called “Table Talk”. In addition, we all caught up on what we have been doing the last few days and talked about what we were most looking forward to for the coming week. This week we will all be visiting many companies around the Valley and meeting with Notre Dame Alumni. We are especially looking forward to shadowing on Wednesday and visiting Google, Stryker, IDEO, Survey Monkey and many other companies. We can’t wait to explore the technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship of Silicon Valley!