GDSC UB 2021: The Threshold of a New Age
It’s impressive to see how technology plays such a significant role in our life. From Monday to Sunday, AM to PM, technology lingers like a true best friend. It becomes a game-changer that makes our life rotate around it on a daily basis. The professional industry is also taking heed to technology and counting it as the primadonna of the brand.
As a university student, I can see many fellow students begin to pay attention to their future career paths. A tech startup is one of the dream companies they keep in mind. While being asked what the main reason for it, the answer is:
It’s cool how we manage to work in a field related to our life.
And it couldn’t be more accurate than that, technology is indeed related to any aspect of our life.
But one thing to be highlighted here is practical skills are highly required to enter the IT-related industry. Some might have taken baby steps and joined communities related to the field of their dream, but others? They got lost.
They do not know how essential it is to prepare for their future careers. They do not have access to elevate their knowledge and skills. The question is, how could this happen?
The lack of communities to grow with.
Having a friend to discuss with and study together makes the learning process enjoyable. That’s why community plays a meaningful part as a safe place for anyone who wants to start afresh and learn something new. But what if the community itself doesn’t exist? It will be difficult for the students to develop their interests and knowledge.
The existing communities are too “exclusive” to join.
Even when such communities exist, they have to undergo a tight selection process to get selected as community members. This leaves no room for those who do not have experience or skills to begin with. As a result, they lose the confidence and motivation to start over.
One day our lead, Hanifa Putri Rahima, thought it was not enough just to sit and watch the fellow companions wandering around. So, she has been thinking of solving this problem and contributing more because she believes that every student has the same potential and deserves to have a comfortable place to grow.
Thus, here she is with the other nine individuals in a team named Google Developer Student Clubs or GDSC chapter University of Brawijaya 2021 to provide a community to welcome people regardless of their background and ability and encourage them to learn through hands-on experience. With a team covering Learning Development, Events, Public Relations, and Media Creative, Hani aims to accommodate fellow students to shape their potential career path by empowering their practical skills so they can be more industry-ready.
The journey began with the first-ever event held in September, the Info Session x Tech Talk. Together with the community development core team GDSC UB, Alizza Iman Raddin, Hani introduces GDSC to the audiences. Hani and Liza revealed the activities plan, the membership, and the benefits of joining GDSC UB.
Alongside the Info Session, there was also Tech Talk covering the topic of “How to Break into Startup as A College Student” with the Co-Founder & CEO of Riliv, Audrey Maximillian Herli. Kak Maxi shared the beginning of Riliv during his college years, the obstacles and the stories behind the stage, and how Kak Maxi and his team managed to make Riliv one of the influential startups in Indonesia now. Over 250+ audiences came and enlivened the entire event!
We ended the day with the Opening of GDSC UB Member Registration that received fantastic feedback from the audiences — or now our members! Later, we found out that over 700+ members had joined us in just a day! We really can’t thank our members enough for this massive reaction and enthusiasm towards GDSC UB.
But, the journey didn’t stop right here as it was only the beginning. As we want anyone to enjoy discovering the topics they are interested in, we provide two learning scopes for technical and non-technical fields named #TechSeries and #ProductSeries. With that goal in mind, we set up the date, took the ticket, and got ready for our next stop, workshop!
We encourage the members to discuss the learning material in a Q&A and quiz session during the workshop and support them in implementing it right away in a challenge. Activeness and challenges will help us to select the best participant and the best challenger of the workshop. We want to ensure the members that in GDSC UB, they can learn in a supportive environment with valuable feedback from the facilitators.
Web Development Fundamentals marked as our very first #TechSeries Workshop held last October. Facilitated by our Web & Cloud Learning Development, Irvan Rizki Nugraha, explaining HTML Semantically, CSS in Depth, Basic Logic with JavaScript, and CSS Bootstrap.
Around 100+ members came and participated in our workshop. We hosted a mini-challenge where the members were asked to create their web portfolios. By the end of the day, we had 36 challenges submitted to us.
Once October finally came to an end, a new month arrived and in GDSC UB, a new month equals new activity!
This month, we made another stop in our second #TechSeries Workshop talking about KOTLIN 101 with our Android Learning Development, Kylix Eza Saputra. The workshop was held for two days in a row, where the learning journey was divided into two topics. The first day covered the Basic Programming with Kotlin and the second day talked about Kotlin as OOP & Clean Code.
November has not ended yet, but we have already prepared for more exciting events next time. We want to keep our mission going by making GDSC UB a friendly space for students to seek and learn IT-related materials and strengthen their practical skills to be more industry-ready!
We are still open to anyone willing to study both technical and non-technical fields. So, if you are interested in having a community to learn together with, we are very delighted to welcome you! :)
