My experience as the Google Developer Student Clubs Lead at McGill University
Being the Head Prefect and Model UN President in my high school (Sri Lanka) made me understand my passion for leadership.
I was extremely new to programming and the world of technology when I started university. Therefore, I spent my first two years at college trying to get better at understanding the ins and out of the world of software. I started to work with other clubs to absorb as much knowledge I could from the existing student leaders.
As soon as the opportunity came up to represent Google’s Developer Student Clubs, I raced to it and found myself pitching my case to Googlers in North America.
What’s Google DSC’s role at McGill?
It’s a community (powered by Google Developers) for students at McGill who are interested in Google developer technologies. I would stretch this and say that it’s a community for people who are interested in all forms of tech stacks. The definition and road map for a Google DSC has the potential of changing every year based on its Google DSC Lead, Core Team, and the student interests at McGill.
Favourite Challenges
The interesting part of being chosen as the first lead for any club on campus is that you have to handcraft the blueprint for how the club should function and you are going to have to play a huge hands-on role in comparison to clubs that already have a functioning system and a large reach inside the campus. This coupled with the fact that the semester has been online/virtual brought up some interesting challenges
1. Creating an Audience for DSC
DSC wasn’t a common name in the halls of McGill so I had to start getting the word out to the tech community at McGill so that I could build out a core team and also try my best to make tech enthusiasts understand the goal of the club and the opportunities that come with it.
I am a huge fan of the LinkedIn algorithm and I started there to make sure the word spreads around. Other clubs were nice enough to reach out and help out with the process by endorsing DSC McGill as a good opportunity for students. This gave me the chance to converse with other student leaders much easily since clubs are looking forward to collaborating. These conversations helped me learn to be even more efficient and strategic as a technological advocate
2. Finding The Right Team
I was happy to recruit my team and meet some superstars at McGill. The nice part about being in an environment like McGill (or any university with passionate individuals) is that you are almost always certain that the people you choose to work with will inspire you.
The club was able to achieve a decent amount of success given our circumstances and we had 100+ students interested in our events and the software development tips that we have been providing through our workshops. You can find some of them on Youtube, (Developer Student Clubs — McGill), website or on our community dev page
However, one thing I could have improved as a leader was building stronger friendships among the team. At some points, the relationships within the group felt semi-formal and I think doing more virtual games and having more meetup type events among a group of people will make the club function more efficiently. I tried to keep meetings short and precise and my initial reasoning was that I wanted to minimize the amount of time a meeting might take so people could go about their work more efficiently. But the cost of that was losing out on stronger ties among the group. I would improve on building camaraderie and this becomes much easier when things become in person.
3. Coming to terms with limitations and failures
I had much more planned out for the club for the year but sometimes we forget the limitations that come with resources or how some projects just fail in terms of execution.
There were some events that didn’t go as great as planned and there were some events that didn’t launch at all but I think it was important for me and the rest of the team to still proceed with the program and accumulate as many wins as we can.
A lot of students tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves about things they can’t control but I think sometimes we need to understand that circumstances are always going to differ through every distinct situation in our lives and what we can control is dedicating ourselves to our craft and responsibilities to the best of our abilities and surrounding ourselves with people who will help us be much more efficient with those efforts.
We can’t have it all sometimes. We should always just try our best to be our best selves and the rest will take care of itself.
How can I be a Google DSC Lead? Do I have what it takes?
I don’t think anyone should hesitate to apply to the position because the main skill needed to be successful in the role is a keen passion for building a community and identifying individuals that might help you grow the community across the school so that more students might benefit from it.
Tech skills are great because it helps you converse with the more technical members of your upcoming Core Team and it certainly helps when planning for your club but I hope people won’t overestimate how technically proficient they need to be to take up the role!
You can apply on: https://developers.google.com/community/dsc
I am allowed to nominate a limit amount of students for the role so if you want to have a semi formal interview with me please email me on maneth.kulatunge@mail.mcgill.ca and attach your resume on it.
I hope this gave students at McGill some insight on this up and coming club!
