Graduate /
The Sun Club for students at my undergraduate institute formed with support from Sun Microsystems. [2]
Describe your most significant extra-curricular activity.The Sun Club was a student club at my undergraduate institute formed with support from Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems ran a program wherein they chose student Campus Ambassadors in engineering colleges across India to evangelise Sun Microsystems' products, such as NetBeans, Glassfish, and OpenSolaris, among engineering students.
When I was in my sophomore year at college, Sun Microsystems selected a student from the third year to be the Campus Ambassador. The campus ambassador's job was to form a student club on campus. For this, interviews were held by the campus ambassador and a project manager from Sun Microsystems. More than sixty sophomores and third-year students appeared for the interviews out of which six students were selected and I was one of them. The Sun Club mainly focused on seminars and talks on the various Sun technologies by the campus ambassador. During the first year of the club, my job was to market the events among students and ensure we had a decent turnout at each of our events. To accomplish this, I ran email campaigns, designed and put up advertisements on hostels' notice boards, and spoke with small gatherings in common rooms in hostels. In these advertisements, I portrayed how these technologies would help the students secure and succeed in their jobs if they were to join a software firm.
However, the turnout in our events was only satisfactory with about twenty people attending the seminars and most of the audience comprised of M.Tech students. My personal objective was to lure B.Tech students to attend the events as I was of the opinion that learning these technologies would be useful during campus placements. Later, I realised that the topics of the seminars were too advanced which made it difficult for B.Tech students to connect with the material. To solve the problem, I decided to step up and designed a complete course on the Java programming language. The Java programming language was one of the most popular during the time and much sought after by recruiters. I then organised and presented a series of tutorials - a mix of seminars and hands-on practical sessions. The Java tutorial series immediately connected with students as they were able to perceive the short-term value of the course and consequently the number of attendees for these series easily exceeded a hundred every time. In addition to sophomores and third-year students, it was exhilarating to find a number of freshmen attending the series.
In my third year at college, I was selected to be the campus ambassador and lead the activities of the Sun Club. After achieving decent success in the first year of operations, we decided to up the ante. For this, I interviewed and inducted ten more students from among sophomores and first-year students. In addition to restarting the Java tutorial series again, I started planning more advanced topics related to web development using Sun technologies. These took the form of making small teams of three to four students which worked together on individual projects such as a library management system, a classroom attendance system, and an inter-LAN movies distribution system. Given the bustling activity at the campus, I was able to convince Sun Microsystems to fund some of our activities in the form of prize money and books on the technologies. Using those as prizes, I conducted quarterly programming contests which was attended by not only our students but also students from other engineering colleges in town.
One of Sun Club's major achievements was unanimously changing the dominant programming language used by students for their assignments. During the first version of the Java tutorial series, I convinced the administration to allow us to install Sun technologies in one of our computer laboratories. As interest in the programming language grew, students stopped submitting assignments in the programming languages which were recommended by professors and switched to using Java. This change was so noticeable that the head of the department asked the Sun Club to equip computers in all the laboratories in the computer science department with Java and NetBeans.
The association with the Sun Club is undoubtedly the most enriching experience I had in college. Not only the deep friendships that I made with the members of the club but also our impact on the employability of students as was visible during the campus placements made this experience special for me. Just before graduating, I organised an open pizza party sponsored by the Sun Club which was attended by over two hundred students from freshmen to the graduating class and it was heartening to narrate and relive the journey with hoots and applauses from the Sun Club Community.
