Face time: White Station Middle School students get up-close visit with social-media site’s engineer

Metro centerpiece for The Commercial Appeal

Nov. 23, 2011

While visiting family for the Thanksgiving holiday, Joel Seligstein stopped by White Station Middle School to speak to more than 100 students about his job at a company they all “like.”

Seligstein has been a software engineer for Facebook in Palo Alto, Calif., since 2007.

His talk to the 13- and 14-year-olds was arranged through his cousin, Rachel Seligstein, an eighth-grader at the school, and Jennifer Brenneman, her CLUE teacher.

“You have a young guy, 26 years old, living the dream with Facebook as an engineer, and he got started in the science and math fields, so I wanted (the students) to see the relevance to what they’re currently studying,” Brenneman said.

Seligstein said the means to getting where he is, at a desk 30 feet from company founder Mark Zuckerberg in a corporation that feeds its employees three meals a day and provides pool tables, basketball courts and all the video game time a middle school student could dream of, was to “keep pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and trying new things.

“Any idea that you have, move fast and make it a reality; try it, and if it doesn’t work, try something else.” … (read more)

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