07/22/2026
Today, our Scholars spent the day at Snap’s headquarters in Times Square for a Career Exploration Day built around one question: what does it actually look like to work here?
They heard from five people across the company. Adonis Serrano, a software engineering intern working on omni-channel notifications. Adaora Ugokwe, who went from sports medicine to business marketing. Mary Peng, a group product manager focused on building engaging products that respect user attention. Shantanu Kumar, five years deep in product, obsessed with connecting people to each other instead of just features. And Chandelle Wiebe, who leads global philanthropy.
Five different roles, five different paths into the same building. The panelists came from CS, applied math, communications, first-gen and immigrant households. One thing they kept coming back to: willingness to keep learning mattered more than what you studied.
The panelists talked about cross-functional collaboration, about a bias toward action, about why empathy and real relationship-building matter as much as technical skill. Several named waiting tables, running a campus club, and volunteering as where their real training started. Snap’s philanthropy team talked about partnerships that bring STEM and AR training to communities that don’t always get access to those tools. And one detail stuck with the room: Lens Studio, the platform behind Snapchat’s AR lenses, is free and open to anyone.
Between sessions, our Scholars sat in council, a practice Snap uses internally where people speak from the heart and listen without responding.
We’re grateful to the Snap team for opening their doors and showing our Scholars that the way into a company like this is wider than they might think.
