Network. It Can Take You Places.

I was printing some documents and doing my German homework at my hall’s common room where I met another exchange student, Tonny. He is taking the same course and we immediately got talking over the homework and how hard the whole course is. Tonny is an exchange student as well from Sydney, Australia. He had already completed the whole of the homework (Ssshhh! His roommate is from Germany!) so he helped me complete a lot of it. Went went on to have dinner afterwards and began talking about where all we’ve both visited so far in Singapore. He told me that he was going to visit the Google office with a few of his friends the next day and then planning to go to Sentosa island with a few of his friends later on and if I wanted to join for the second plan. By mere listening to the words “Google office”, I lost track of what he said beyond that. I asked him if I could join them for the visit to the prestigious Google’s office but had to listen to a sorry as he could only get so many people in and the number of them was already confirmed. He apologized saying that he would have definitely offered to take me had he known me before. Anyway, now that he knew me, I asked him to keep me in mind for any such future adventures and made plans to go to Sentosa with them. Thinking I’ll go to the office by myself, I came back to the room and started figuring out how to do that. To my surprise, I found out that their office in Singapore is the headquarters of Google Inc. for the entire Asia Pacific region! I also found out that to have a tour of the office, one is supposed to write emails to the head of the office requesting for it and it is totally upon their discretion if they allow. I decided to go to sleep and write an email the next morning in hope to get a reply.

Saturday, an off-work day, was set to become a lazy day so I had no alarms to wake me up; however, my sleep was broken by the momentary ping of a WhatsApp notification. There was a message from Tonny. One of the guys backed out at the last moment so he wanted to know if I was in. If I was, I was supposed to come down in half an hour. My friends and family know that I can do anything for my sleep. I even have a history of not making it for a few exams due to oversleeping but this was GOOGLE! How could I choose something I have in excess amounts over a once in a lifetime opportunity? I immediately got off the bed and was down at the bus stop in twenty minutes. I met Tonny’s friends- Alina, Kelvin, Mark and Alexander, the former two being from Melbourne, Australia and the latter two from Germany. We called an Uber and decided to take a direct ride to the office. Throughout the ride, I kept on pondering how I had no plans yesterday and a sleep later, I was going to have a tour of my dream office!

I was glad that unlike some of my friends, I do not stay inside my own bubble. I love talking to the people whom I don’t know and I love making instant plans. Had I been in my room that day and not doing my homework in the common room, I would not have met Tonny. All of you reading it, listen! I’ve met best of the people in life unexpectedly and have gone on to have the most life-changing experiences with them. Get out of that room, look away from your phone’s screen time to time and make efforts to know more and more people to hang out with, not just as your friends on Facebook! Not all networks are formed on LinkedIn as well. Stay tuned to find out how life-changing the visit to Google Headquarters was! Till then, keep wondering about where you’ll go in the next step towards spreading your network all over the world!