Honors College Alumnus of the Year: Sean Kau

In UNLV’s Honors College, Sean Kau found a community within the Rebel community. After completing his degree in computer science, he worked at Shuffle Master as a software engineer before joining Google, where he’s worked since 2013.

Kau credits his time at UNLV with providing both technical skills he needed to land those early jobs and the so-called “soft skills” in communication he needed to succeed at one of the world's premier tech firms.

What does being selected as the 2026 Honors College Honoree mean to you?

Moving across the Pacific from Hawaii to Las Vegas to attend UNLV was a major transition for me. Stepping onto a large campus could have felt overwhelming, but the Honors College immediately gave me a tight-knit community and a sense of belonging. The small class sizes and close connections with professors helped me find my footing right away, giving me the confidence to dive deep into computer science.

I realize now just how foundational those years were. Receiving this recognition brings my whole journey full circle, from taking a leap of faith moving away from home, to building a career I love, all backed by the strong start I got at UNLV.

What drew you to UNLV’s Honors College, and how did it shape your technical career at Google?

The academic support and priority registration made a large state university feel accessible and focused. While computer science taught me how to write code, the Honors College emphasized communication, critical thinking, and structured expression. Courses like Honors Rhetoric and Public Speaking with professors Maria Jerinic and Bill Belk forced me to clarify complex ideas. In software engineering, the ability to break down large, ambiguous systems and explain technical problems to non-technical teams is what separates good engineers from great ones.

Is there a specific project you have worked on at Google that you are especially proud of?

In 2017, I led the team that launched native printing infrastructure for Chromebooks. Printers are famously technology's most maligned devices; everybody loves to hate them. Launching printing capabilities on an operating system for the first time gave me an up-close view of why hardware integration is so difficult. Our team focused on making the experience as seamless as possible for millions of daily users.

What I’m most proud of isn't just that we wrote code that worked, but how we solved the problem for the user. Watching our work go live and knowing we transformed a daily friction point into a seamless, built-in feature for millions of students, teachers, and professionals using Chromebooks every day was incredibly rewarding.

What advice would you give UNLV students hoping to build careers at top technology companies?

Learn systems thinking. It’s the ability to take a massive, ambiguous problem and break it down into smaller, actionable sub-problems until you find the pieces you can directly solve. To do that, you have to stay deeply curious about how systems work — whether in computer science, economics, history, or literature. 

Also, remember that there is no better way to learn technology than by using and building it yourself. Don't just read about tools; find a problem in your daily life and try to build a system that solves it.