🎉 I got promoted to Gold
News Update
On Jan 30 2023, after 1 year and 5 months of being in the program, I finally got promoted to be a Gold Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador. This is an incredible milestone in this journey, the me 2 years ago would’ve never expected this, but the hard work had finally paid of.
Ambassador Recap
To celebrate this occasion, I thought it would be a great opportunity to recap and look back on all the key events that I’ve got to experience in the Microsoft Learn Student Community.
Prologue
I joined the program sometime during October of 2021.
MVP Mentoring
The first thing that got me started when I knew nothing about Microsoft was getting mentorship from a Microsoft MVP. I was fortunate enough to meet John Lunn, who gave me life changing career guidance and advice the entire way and even now.
We did a bunch of sessions talking about random things with technology, learning and being a part of the community. I think this context that I got early on really set up my expectations of my journey through tech and helped me explore in a smart and efficient way.
Intro to Web Assembly Talk
This was my first online presentation I did as a student ambassador. I remember having the option to choose from a bunch of premade workshops but I was working with a little bit of web assembly at that time, and I thought it was not really well known, so I decided to talk about it.
It was no easy feat putting together a one hour technical session, I needed to
- research the content 📖
- filter and extract them into easy to digest points 🧠
- make presentation slides look captivating 🎨
- come up with demos to prove the concepts ⚒️
- market it to students who are really busy 👨🏼💼
- host it online myself 👨🏼💻
- and finally learn speaking skills and give the talk 🗣️
A lot of unexpected but useful skills and lessons were gained from just this one activity.
But I also remember making a bunch of mistakes while giving the workshop due to the lack of preparation, this was a very technical topic which I wasn’t an expert of yet, I also did not manage to rehearse the talk, resulting in me stuttering a bunch. Even though this experience still haunts me to this day, it also became a reminder in the back of my head to always pay attention to my speach, resulting in me having better speaking skills today.
Fortunately, the feedback and reception went well and this got me promoted to be a 🎉Beta Student Ambassador🎉.
Microsoft Reactor Student Meetup
This event had a very funny story behind it, I remember just replying to join the event as a participant, but the organizer mistaked me as wanting to speak instead. I had never given an in person talk before, so I just rejected it without second thought. But soon after, a voice within me told me to just give it a try, I had nothing to lose so I messaged the organizer again to change my mind.
I ended up talking about how Microsoft tools, technologies and opportunities can help students get their start in tech.
Looking back now, this event was the one that really kickstarted my ambassador experience for me, I was able to meet a bunch of new people, and further opportunities came from there, which built my experience to eventually reach this stage. To think that I almost threw away this opportunity, I’m glad I didn’t.
Speedrunning the Microsoft Fundamental Certificates
I’ve been hearing a lot about the benefits of the Microsoft Certifications and how they are free for students from a bunch of events. So when I finally had free time after my university exams, I decided to take on the AZ-900 exams.
Personally, I was also thinking about how outdated the stuff I was learning in university is, and I was lacking modern computing knowledge, so I decided to learn directly from the industry leader itself through Microsoft Learn. The exam seemed like the perfect motivation I needed to get started 🤩.
I was thirsty for a challenge as well, so I tried doing it as fast as I can, and if you want to see how I did, I filmed the entire thing. Surprisingly, the content wasn’t super complicated and I was able to learn and complete it in just 4 days.
After finishing one exam and seeing how easy it was, I treated the exams as if they were games, and ended up with this after a month!
Micosoft Student Summit Careers Panel
Another opportunity came to speak, this time it was for the Microsoft Student Summit for the EMEA region. I was invited to be a co-host for a careers panel. There was nothing much to prepare for this event, I just had to be there and ask questions to the panelists.
It is still surreal to think that I had the opportunity to get involved in something like this! The event was streamed live on Microsoft Developer’s Youtube channel, so I got to see myself on the big screen.
I was able to gain some insights from the speakers and also got the opportunity to share about the ambassador program myself. Still need some work on my speaking skills though 😅.
Social Impact Project
Throughout my ambassador journey, I learned a lot but didn’t really code much, so I decided to participate in a Social Impact Project, this is a 3 month project where you work on something for the community. I was placed in a project to build an Imagine Cup prototype for the healthcare track as a team lead.
It certainly wasn’t an easy experience, leading a team was hard, thinking of ideas was hard, and there was a bunch of Azure to learn. We ended up making Diabot, a glucose management app for diabetics, that uses a virtual assistant interface instead of just the usual app.
I have this really bad habit of pushing myself to do insane challenges, I decided to build this using a full stack that I know nothing about, which uses .NET MAUI, .NET 7, Azure Mobile Apps, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Bot Service, Azure Cognitive Speech Service etc, a full on Microsoft Stack!. A lot of learning was done and we somehow finished it in time!
What I had learned so far
Overall, I was only able to get this far because of all the support I’ve gotten from the people I’ve met along the way. It really has been a wild ride, followed by a domino effect of opportunities that I never thought I would get. I am very grateful to everyone who has been a part of this journey.
The key takeaways from my time of being an ambassador are:
- Say yes to everything if you’re in a student ambassador program, you never know what you might learn from it
- University content is outdated, and you need to learn from the industry itself
- You get rewarded for your effort, but you need to put in the effort
- There are tons of ways to get involved in the community even as a student
- Networking is key to every opportunity in life, go out and meet people
- Having good speaking and presenting skills makes you a far better engineer
What I want to achieve next
After my 1 year of being an ambassador, I’ve seen and experienced a bunch of problems firsthand with regards to getting students involved and also getting the UK ambassadors involved.
For the UK ambassadors
I want to work on organizing more engagement sessions, starting by getting to know each other better because we are still a very small community, maybe host visits to each universities as ambassadors to hangout. Once that’s done, then only focus on expanding the community and getting more students involved.
For the students at my university
I want to get them more involved in opportunities and free resources that Microsoft has to offer. I want to work on creating a community of students that are interested in tech and help them get started, and if they’re interested, get them involved in the ambassador program.
For myself
I want to work on creating content on more niche topics with Azure, I have read a bunch of Microsoft documentation so far and I just feel like a lot of it is tailored towards beginners. Doing this would give me the platform to constantly learn new technologies and give back to the community at the same time.
[Update 21/05/23] Gold milestone reward
After the promotion, you get sent another swag kit! More free stuff is always nice 😊
