Due to editing errors, this article has been corrected.
Alex Buder Shapiro is approaching graduation - but her days of playtime, recess and cafeteria food are far from over.
The College senior is taking a job in human resources at Google. There, her playtime will be a game of pool with colleagues, recess will be climbing up an indoor rock wall and cafeteria food will be tapas at Cafe Pintxo.
Google, which some liken to an up-scale college campus, seems to have found a balance between work and play for its employees, creating a fun office environment that attracts many job-seeking students to the company.
That environment, Buder Shapiro said, is similar to a college campus, and a major reason she was drawn to the company, which was named the No. 1 business to work for by Fortune Magazine this year.
The Googleplex, Google's main campus in Mountain View, Calif., is a "great environment" for new graduates, Buder Shapiro said. Like Penn, she said, Google's headquarters is a setting which appeals to intellectuals.
Students want to work at companies "with other smart, well-rounded people like themselves," said Rosette Pyne, senior associate director at Penn's Career Services. She added that more students have been seeking employment at technology companies in recent years, and that the Google name also attracts students to that company.
For Buder Shapiro, that brand name is associated with a culture of creativity.
"Creative minds are encouraged," she said. "The quality of the products depends on them."
To foster this sense of creativity, all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time at work experimenting with projects that interest them. Half of Google's new products originate from this 20-percent time, said Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, in a talk at Stanford University in August.
In recent months, Google has garnered attention for the numerous free services it offers to employees.
Some of that attention has stemmed from the Googleplex's 11 gourmet cafeterias, which provide employees with three free meals a day. Other amenities the company provides range from breast pumps for nursing mothers to heated toilets.
Others in the technology world wonder if happy workers are the key to Google's success. But there might be risks involved with that strategy, said Debbie Willingham, vice president of human resources at BMC Software, a Houston-based company.
"Treating people better is never a bad investment, but if Google ever ran into a situation where it needed to cut costs, it's going to be very hard to take away luxuries employees take for granted," she said.
