I look forward to Casual Friday and all the informality that comes with it. These past two weeks, my Friday sessions at Google’s HPS program have been packed with breakout rooms and interactive mentorship. During the first week, we had informal coffee chats. Last week, we talked about impostor syndrome.

I still look back to my experience in Week 1. While the informal atmosphere of the coffee chats was great, what I remember about them was the answers the Product Advisors (PAs) and Program Managers (PMs) gave. Our questions as mentees were not unique: tell us about a day at Google, what do you like about the company, what was your career path like, how did you choose your specialty. However, what struck me was how different the answers we received were.

I’ll give a simple example. In one of my breakout rooms, I asked the PA what the greatest advice she had received was. Her answer was not the usual statement or paragraph I was used to hearing. Instead, she told me about a time in her life when she struggled with Physics. “I felt so behind my peers that I started to think that there was something wrong with me, that maybe I was not as smart as anyone else,” she said. Her statement reflected my imposter syndrome from Freshman year. She then went on to tell me a story of how her Physics teacher at the time encouraged her to try a different way of learning, to learn by doing. Turns out she was the type that needed to know the background of a formula or process to understand its application. Through understanding her method of learning, she was able to grasp content better and become competent and confident in her ideas. That was how she ended up a mechanical engineer in Google’s PA department.

It was interesting to see how much we learn from observation and trying instead of hearing about what to do.