My journey as a Google Developer Student Club Lead

I have recently completed my one-year tenure as a Google Developer Student Club Lead. And I chose to pen down my journey of establishing a club from 0 to make it a 500+ members club completely online and remotely.

So it all started in 2019, I was in 2nd year and I saw a couple of posts regarding the Developer Student Club lead selection. I searched about it on Google and learned that it is a club for students interested in Google technologies. As I already missed the deadline for India, I started preparing for the 2020 cohort. I worked on my interpersonal and gained some industry experience.

I applied for DSC lead in 2020, I was selected for an interview and later I cleared that interview and finally became the first Google Developer Student Club Lead from my college. I was on cloud nine and it was like a dream come true for me.

I was onboarded and even got a cool welcome kit. View the unboxing video here.

My first responsibility as a DSC lead was to form a team. Actually, we don’t have a developer community environment in our college. Students are more interested in grades and competitive coding. They are unaware of the advantage of being connected to a community. [Hopefully, things are changing now.]

I started with team formation. I would like to thank Dhruv Sharma, my classmate and core team member of our club. He helped me throughout the whole process. We mailed to all the students of our college that we are looking for core team members and in 2-3 days, we received 300+ applications. We shortlisted 70 students for interviews and then selected 12 students for our core team. We had our first team call online where we discussed everyone’s responsibility, challenges, and goals.

Our second task was to introduce everyone on our campus to the Club and its aim. Somehow we managed to organize an introductory session with the help of our college and team. Later we created WhatsApp groups and Slack channels to communicate with our community members.

Initially, things were difficult for us because if you are managing a club in your campus physical then it is easy to communicate with the team and community members but running a club completely online is surely a difficult task.

Somehow we managed everything at the right pace and we were all set to start our journey. Our first event was Explore ML, and we got 120+ registrations and 80+ attendees. Later we organized events on multiple topics like Open source, Android, Cloud computing, interview preparation, Flutter, Kotline, Community, Entrepreneurship, etc.

We also hosted some giveaways to keep our community members engaged and most of our events had some goodies and swags as prizes.

After one year’s hard work, some of our club’s statics are:

Total registered community members: 584
Total events organized: 15
Average event registrations: 117

On 27th July 2021, We organized our last event where we invited Mrs. Mekhla Mukherjee(Global Open source community leader, Wipro) and Mr. Snehanshu Gandhi(Founder & Director, Kaagaz Scanner). And I graduated as a Google Developer Student Club lead on 1st July with an online graduation ceremony.

We managed every event and program completely online. There are some members in my team, I never met in person. Still, we managed all the things very well. That’s why I would like to give the whole credit to my awesome team for everything they have done.

The program improved my communication, team management, and leadership skills. I made some new connections and learned a lot of new things. To know more about the program, visit here.