Biography | Sergey Brin — The 1993 Maryland Degree Before Stanford and Google

Sergey Brin graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993 with an honors Bachelor of Science in mathematics and computer science. His undergraduate degree belongs to Maryland; the graduate work that led toward Google came afterward at Stanford.

That distinction matters when tracing his education on a map. A reference to Brin leaving a doctoral program should not be read as a claim that he never graduated from college.

The university's Computer Science Hall of Fame records both his 1993 bachelor's degree and his 1995 Master of Science at Stanford. It also describes the suspension of his doctoral studies while he worked on Google.

Maryland was a family connection as well as an academic one: his father, Michael Brin, taught mathematics at the university. The institution's later accounts identify Sergey as an alumnus of both mathematics and computer science.

Google's own history places the meeting with Larry Page at Stanford in 1995, followed by their collaboration on a search engine that used links between web pages. Those events belong to the next stage of his education, on the other side of the country.

There is a chronological trap in the photograph attached to this memory. The Computer Science Instructional Center opened in July 2002, according to the department's historical timeline, so it could not have housed Brin's undergraduate classes before his 1993 graduation.

The photograph shows the later campus, and this existing pin marks its photographed viewpoint as an orientation point. Neither establishes a particular classroom used by Brin or the venue of his graduation ceremony.

Seen with those dates in mind, the building offers a way to recognize the university today while keeping the earlier achievement in its proper year. The durable fact is the completed degree in 1993, before Stanford, before the partnership with Page, and before Google.

Sources: UMD Computer Science Hall of Fame; UMD departmental timeline; UMD on the Brin family and mathematics; Google corporate history.

Photo: Gnupratchett, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, taken 22 June 2025. Contemporary campus context, not a photograph from Brin’s student years.