How to establish a Developer Student Club at your campus?

3 min readJun 5, 2020

Preface: I will walk you through 5 steps of establishing a Developer Student Club in this article. Sit back and enjoy!

Hi everyone, I am Alex, the founder of DSC@HKUST. If you don’t know what Developer Student Club (DSC) is, I have prepared another article for your reference. Without further ado, let’s get started. \ (•◡•) /

1. The Core Team

First and foremost, assemble your team. Leading a community is never a one-man job. The better you can manage a team, the more you can achieve in your one-year journey as a DSC Student-Lead. Very fortunately, I have an awesome team to work with, so here’s a big shout out to them. Let’s begin with the type of specialists that you probably need for your team.

Secretary:

Secretary is super important since you will be talking to him/her most of the time. He/she will give you operational advice and finish most of the paperwork (meeting minutes, emails and official documentation) for you.

Graphic designer(s):

A graphic designer will be in charge of the poster design and graphics-related work. It is recommended to recruit someone with prior experiences on graphics design. Plus, it is better to hire multiple designers since the workload is quite heavy according to my experience.

Photographer:

Photographer will be in charge of recording an event. Besides photographing, also look for people who have experience in streaming in case you need to host online events due to possible factors like COVID-19.

Core member(s): (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ︵ ╯(°□° ╯)

Core members will assist you in hosting and preparing for events. Try to recruit core members with observable enthusiasm in tech. Due to the huge workload, you might need 5–7 core members.

2. The Annual Plan

It is a plan for various events that you and your team would like to host. You are strongly advised to set it up as soon as possible as having clear objectives helps you and your team allocate time. For your reference, we have hosted 6 events with the majority being Flutter-related workshops plus a Solution Challenge project. You can choose topics that you and your team are interested in, for instance, Go, TensorFlow, Firebase, you name it.

3. Contact the university and get yourself a status

Status for your community is significant since you will need campus facilities as well as equipment such as projector and mic to host events. Status in your campus officiates your school’s support to your community and gives you easier access to school resources. Some campus might have strict rules on founding a club but no worries, you can always find departmental heads or even the principal to help you out. (✿◠‿◠)

4. Calling for help

If you need help, you can always ask in the DSC channel on Slack. Besides, there are various well-established IT communities like Google Developer Expert, Google Developer Group and Microsoft Student Partner which are willing to help. You could always find them and ask for advice if you have any trouble running your community since they are very experienced in this endeavour and might be able to help you with your problem. \(°Ω°)/