Few figures for the year: 5 events, more than 200 participants, speakers from Intel, Tinkoff, Five9 and First Line Software.
Usually I write technical articles on Habr. When I discover something new and interesting in the technologies I work with, I want to share it - ten thousand people will read the article, hundreds will pay attention and dozens will implement it and thank it. Spending a few hours can help people save a lot more time. This is inspiring.
A year ago I decided to try myself in a different role: as an organizer of a community and events where knowledge and experience are exchanged. Then I opened the first Developer Student Club in Russia on the HSE campus in Nizhny Novgorod. It turned out that organizing an environment for the exchange of relevant knowledge inspires even more.
In this article I will talk about what this program is, how we organized our club and what we were able to do in a year. And if you are a student, teacher or other person involved in universities, then I hope this article will show that such a club can appear at your university.
What are the Developer Student Clubs
The Developer Student Clubs program appeared in 2017. The idea is quite simple: in some countries it is very difficult for students after university to find a job, because theoretical knowledge cannot always be transferred to real development. To help students acquire skills relevant to the industry, they were brought together into one large community, provided materials on relevant technologies, invited experts to present best practices for beginners, and allowed students to develop projects and share knowledge themselves.
This scheme worked, the program was successful, and new clubs began to appear in different parts of the world. By 2019, the program reached Europe, and today there are such clubs in more than 750 universities around the world.
Why and how we opened our club
In the summer of 2019, the academic director of my program sent me a link to the news about the opening of the program in Europe. I have previously attended Google Developer Groups events in our city, and I really liked the idea of organizing something like this at the student level. I submitted an application, passed an interview and became the leader of one of the first two clubs in Russia. Ours was in Nizhny Novgorod, the second - in Kaliningrad.
Our year began with a summit that brought together leaders from all over Europe. We spent three days in Paris, visiting the local Google headquarters, Googlers and representatives of the Google Dev communities gave talks and conducted workshops on topics related to technology and community organization.
How the club was organized
When I returned from the inaugural summit, the first thing I did was gathering the core team. It was obvious that nothing cool could be done alone, so I called in three more students to develop the club together.
When we were preparing the first event, everyone just did what they were ready to help with. After a couple of events, we formed an understanding of who is doing what: someone communicates with the speakers, someone decides the administrative part, someone writes posts on social networks, someone solves urgent issues at the right time.
For communication on the Internet, we started all social networks for our club and began to promote them among students. It quickly became clear that public VKgrows the best, so we decided to focus on it. The decision was justified - the group quickly developed among the students of our campus and gained more than 250 subscribers. This is the majority of all IT-related students on the HSE campus in Nizhny Novgorod.
There was also external communication - I regularly communicated with leads from other countries on a common European call. There we shared our experience when someone did something cool, and discussed what activities could be organized in the future.
There was also a local call - for the Russian DSC community. Since we had only two clubs, the calls were received for three - me, Anya from Kaliningrad, and Katya , the Google community manager in Russia.
In such communities, no one controls or tells what to do. But everyone is always happy to suggest a suitable tool or service to solve an organizational problem, share useful materials, help with contact, word or deed.
For example, thanks to the GDG community in our city, I found a couple of the coolest speakers for our events, as well as a bag of gifts for contests and sweepstakes for participants. In turn, I helped with the organization of a couple of GDG events - and so a mutually beneficial exchange turned out.
Some statistics for the year
Our first event was the introductory meetup. At it we decided to act as a core team to tell the guys about who we are, what and how we plan to do, briefly about the technologies that we could pay attention to.
Based on the feedback, we collected several areas that interested students the most, and began to plan events for them.
In total, we organized 5 events: three big meetups on different technologies, an Angular workshop and a meeting with Zhenya Nekrasov from Vladivostok on the important topic of Accessibility.
We invited speakers from local companies to meetups to talk about the current technologies they use in their work. At first, I just called my friends from the Nizhny Novgorod communities, but as our club developed, more opportunities began to appear: some companies themselves took the initiative and offered speakers, working students began to share more knowledge and prepared speeches.
The reports from more experienced students, I believe, were our discovery. When a speaker from the company tells the guys, everything is cool - they listen carefully, ask questions about the topic, and adopt something. But when a student speaker speaks, the audience comes alive a little more: the questions may not be entirely on the topic, but exciting and relevant, and the answers to them may well turn into even a small discussion.
Plans for the new academic year
In the coming academic year, everything will be even more interesting - now Developer Student Clubs are opening in 25 universities in Russia. Here you can see if there is a club in your university or city. If not, why not open another one?
You can be a lead for one year. The next year, the lead changes and the previous one helps to get comfortable with the new, transfers experience and best practices.
After the end of the year, the lead is not left to fend for itself. Google Developers has three other cool communities: Google Developer Groups , Google Developers Experts, and Women Techmakers . During the last calls within the DSC community, we were told in detail what these communities are and how to start participating in them.
GDG is a great option for continuing the DSC lead because it is a very similar organizing activity but on a larger scale.
Total
I am very glad that we managed to launch the club and gather more community within our university. As a leader for this year, I met a lot of interesting people from communities of different cities and countries. And, of course, I learned this feeling of joy and inspiration from the event, which benefited people.