Blaine Billingsley, Religion Alumnus

If you haven’t heard of Google you’ve been living as an ascetic in the desert–St. Antony style!–for the last 15 years. Blaine Billingsley, one of the UVM Religion Department’s alumni, is currently working as designer for Gmail–and to be completely honest, before hearing him speak I had no idea how he got there.

In a way, Blaine stumbled upon his position at Google. With no experience in coding (apart from what all of the Myspace generation had of HTML), Blaine was living in Austin, Texas when a friend suggested they move to San Fransisco. Within weeks Blaine was living on the edge of Silicon Valley working at a low budget startup learning the ropes of Excel data entry. Blaine laughingly told us that he told his interviewer that he was “EXCEL-ent” and knew exactly what he was he was doing… but he didn’t. He “EXCEL-ed” anyway, and eventually landed at Google.

Since joining Google, Blaine has actually done some interviewing himself as a hirer for Google. He says that Liberal Arts students are at the top of his list of candidates. He remarked that the majors in the humanities create “good thinkers.” He expressed that having been a religion major, he sees the world creatively and he brings new ideas to the (tech) table. Speaking with him was a pleasure and I personally found it reassuring that while building resumes is important, building people is vital as part of higher education.

Blaine says that when someone reads your resume and sees “Religion” as your major, they often ask if you are a priest – once you explain you’re not, you get the opportunity to explain what it is you actually know from college. “When you major in business, people have an idea of what you learned in college. But when you major in religion, you get to set those expectations of what a religion major does,” Blaine said.

After this discussion, we moved on to the most important bit: what was his most notable Sugarman story? Blaine’s response: Upon graduating from high school he deferred for a semester to trek around Europe (I’m envious). While in a crummy Venice hostel he met two Americans and told him he would be heading to UVM in the spring. They immediately replied: YOU HAVE TO TAKE A CLASS WITH SUGARMAN! So now with Sugarman in mind, he headed to Germany where he met ANOTHER UVM pal who also urged this soon to be religion undergrad to absolutely NOT–under any circumstances–miss out on the Sugarman experience.

It’s rare that current students get to hear directly from alumni, and as a current REL major, it was refreshing and a relief to hear of success for religion majors (especially outside of academia). Look out Google, I may not know business or high-level tech, but I’ll soon have the same credentials as Blaine.

Interested in more events like this? Join the RelStuds (or Religious Studies Club)! Check us out on instagram: @relstuds or on Facebook.