This series highlights Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors who achieved the Gold milestone and have recently graduated from university. Each blog features a different student and highlights their accomplishments, their experience with the Student Ambassadors community, and what they’re up to now.
Today we’d like to introduce Vivekkumar Parmar who is from India and recently graduated from Dharmsinh Desai University.
Responses have been edited for clarity and length.
When you first joined the Student Ambassadors community in 2018, did you have specific goals you wanted to reach, such as a particular skill or quality? What were they? Did you achieve them? How has the community impacted you in general?
When I joined, I didn’t have any prior experience hosting events and giving seminars on technical topics, but I was very excited to share my knowledge with fellow students. What I saw and experienced at my campus was that students were building amazing projects as part of a curriculum or even for self-learning or as a hobby, but once the development was completed, the code used to reside on a code repository hosting service like GitHub, but there was no practical usage of it. If it had been deployed on a cloud service platform and made available to anyone on the internet, then that same project could have been useful to solve real life problems, so after I became a Student Ambassador, I decided to make the cloud my primary area of focus and conducted various workshops and seminars on Azure. In order to host events on Azure, I had to first learn the concepts, so I explored this domain in depth and gained a thorough understanding, which has helped me in my career too.
What is an accomplishment that you’re the proudest of and why?
I’m proudest of the very first event that I hosted in February 2019 at my university, “Introduction to Cloud Services”. Since I didn’t have any prior experience in event management and delivering speeches, with the help of my classmates (shout out to them – Kaushal, Hardik, Sameer, Utsav & Virat), we planned and successfully organized the event which was attended by 80+ students.
Now why is that event very special to me? That event planted the seeds of cloud at my university. At that time, most of the students on my campus were not familiar with cloud technologies. There were a few technical clubs, but I don’t remember any event being hosted around the cloud domain. With my event, Azure was introduced in our university. It was a half day event. We started with introducing the cloud, Azure, and its services and also had a hands-on workshop at the end. [Thanks to Microsoft for those Azure student credits and Subway meal support!!] Students were really amazed to see various services offered by Azure and how they could implement it in their college projects. After attending that event, a few students took a deep dive into Azure. I used to receive messages from them regarding their queries, and I felt very proud to see them using various Azure services in their projects.
What are you doing now that you've graduated?
I'm passionate about cloud computing and community building. Currently, I’m mentoring a few tech communities of my university and am planning to take a few Azure certification exams in the coming months. I would like to start my career as a DevOps engineer and later become a developer advocate/evangelist. I would love to continue to speak occasionally on Azure, Cloud, DevOps, etc. to share my knowledge.
If you could redo your time with the Student Ambassadors community, is there anything you would have done differently?
Yes. I wasn’t able to interact much with Student Ambassadors from other regions. I would have loved to collaborate with Student Ambassadors from all over the world and host global hackathons and initiate projects with them.
If you were to describe the community to a student who is interested in joining, what would you say about it to convince him or her to join?
Rather than a program, I would describe Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors as a family, a family of like-minded, amazing people from all around the world who are passionate about technology and always excited to share their knowledge and learn something new.
Being part of this community will give you an immense opportunity to represent yourself, your local community, and your university at a global level. It’ll help you grow and strengthen your skill set. And most importantly, you’ll create valuable memories that will stay with you for a very long period!
What advice would you give to new Student Ambassadors?
If you’ve recently joined this community, then first of all, congratulations and welcome! Here are few words of advice from my own experience:
- Don’t be shy. Interact as much as you can with fellow students at your college, other Student Ambassadors from across the globe, and the program team. You’ll learn many things just by communicating with them.
- "Every expert was once a beginner." It’s never too late to start something new. You may face challenges and obstacles in the beginning, but don’t be afraid. Have faith in yourself. Members of our community are very helpful. You can reach out to anyone for help, and I’m sure that you’ll definitely find the solution.
- Participate in various events and activities going on in Teams [Editor’s note: this is the platform through which the Student Ambassadors and the program team communicate and collaborate] and hackathons, etc. as per your interests. Acquire knowledge and do some mini-projects to get hands-on experience and later share it with others by hosting events, writing blogs, or creating video tutorials. Microsoft Learn is one of the best platforms on which to gain a deep understanding of Microsoft technologies.
- Don’t just host events for the sake of doing it or achieving milestones. Enjoy that experience and live that moment that you experience even if only one attendee out of all the participants does something extra after attending your event like exploring in depth a particular technology that was taught, building a project around it, or winning hackathons using any of those technologies. That feeling of happiness and pride you feel will put you on cloud nine. Trust me!
Do you have a motto in life, a guiding principle that drives you?
"Learning is a lifelong process", so keep exploring something new every day.
What is one random fact few people know about you?
Since my early teen years, I wanted to have martial arts training because it helps you build focus, discipline, and mental and physical strength. But unfortunately, I never got an opportunity. Hopefully someday if I get the time and chance to pursue it, then I’m up for it!
Best of luck to you in the future, Vivekkumar!
Posted at https://sl.advdat.com/3BpD7g7
