On April 28, 60 students from five all-girls Jewish high schools — Bruriah, Shevach, Shulamith, Lev Bais Yaakov and Waterbury Bais Yaakov — stepped into one of the most consequential buildings in the modern tech ecosystem: Google’s New York City campus.
The visit to Google, coordinated by CIJE in partnership with Esther Kundin — a Google engineering manager and parent from Manhattan High School — transcended a typical field trip. It represented a strategic, systems-level intervention designed to transform the students’ educational experience.
The day began with a look at Google Music. An Orthodox software engineer explained how artificial intelligence prompts help refine musical recommendations and how code and creativity intersect to generate product optimization. It was a crash course in applied machine learning, yet for the students, it wasn’t a foreign language.
Then came Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle project. A deep dive into I²C protocols revealed something quietly thrilling: these were the same communications tools students had already encountered in their CIJE electrical engineering classes. What once felt like a science fair trick now appeared as the connective tissue in a self-driving car.
Something powerful happens when a student realizes the protocol she’s used in a classroom is also used in a self-driving car, or when she meets someone who once sat where she sits and now works at Google. That recognition — the sudden shift from hypothetical to possible — is how innovation starts.
The most transformational moment came during a panel of three observant Jewish women at Google, each at different stages of their tech careers. They spoke candidly about ambition, late starts, cultural balance, and why coding in high school isn’t a requirement for success but certainly helps. For many girls in the audience, the panel offered something they’d rarely seen so vividly before: a reflection of themselves, projected into the future.
CIJE serves as a crucial link in this context architecture. By building bridges between schools, between curriculum and industry, between aspiration and example, CIJE is constructing a larger narrative — one where Jewish girls who love tech are not an outlier, but part of a growing ecosystem.
And in that sense, this trip wasn’t just about Google. It was about the future we’re building together, one student at a time.
Orly Nadler, director of innovation and STEAM educational consultant/mentor at CIJE, is constantly working on connecting schools and their students to new STEAM opportunities. To learn more about what’s on the horizon at CIJE, visit thecije.org/upcoming-events.
