I decided to write my story of becoming a Gold Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador. This is one of my achievements as a volunteer engineering undergraduate here in Sri Lanka. One year long memories in the global ambassadors community are exciting and worthwhile. My work within the community was recognized and I was nominated as a Gold milestone achiever. My application to join the program was accepted at the beginning of the year 2022. The good news was emailed to me by the program team. The ambassador journey of mine began at this point. I’m sharing my experience with all the readers out there while having an intention of influencing the community around me and clearing the doubts of new ambassadors in the community including new, alpha and beta ambassadors. Happy reading! I completed the onboarding process as quickly as possible. In my time, onboarding consisted of a unique set of tasks including setting up the Microsoft teams, joining the town hall call, etc. The excitement was always there with me. Then I advanced to the alpha milestone after successful completion of the microsoft learn module and actively participating in a league event. I was able to finish the technical onboarding at the same time. Can you imagine how excited I was at the time? Wow! I was just impressed with my progress. It motivated me to learn more about the program and contribute my best to the community. Program team provided us with a Visual studio code enterprise subscription including azure credit, linkedin learning voucher and many more. I’m keen on experimenting new technologies in my leisure time, because of that I utilized my credit in experimenting with azure services. Everything related to azure is properly documented in an understandable way. So, It’s not that harsh to start learning cloud with azure. The next milestone for me was beta. There were two challenging requirements to satisfy. One challenge was hosting a virtual event on a microsoft related technology vertical. I chose it at first rather than going for a social impact project league. I planned my event on Microsoft Power BI. It’s an integrated data visualization tool which facilitates most of the phases of data analysis process. I had been learning the tool for a while during a remote internship I completed as an intern data science analyst with the Plan4CO team. I followed the instructions given and scheduled the event on teams. I delivered an introduction to the data analysis process and demonstrated how to design a dashboard using Power BI to meet the requirements of a given task. The pre-planning and marketing were challenging but I managed to reach the required level, but in the end things went bad. Somehow I missed the recording and the event didn't meet the requirements. Program team approved my event and encouraged me to organize another one to reach my milestone. It was a great experience for me because I realized that anything bad could happen at any time in life without even noticing them in advance. I moved forward with my second event. It was not as challenging as the first time hence I had already gone through it. I signed up for a peer-mentorship program and social impact project at the same time. My first social impact project was not successful but the mentorship event was a success. We all together organized and delivered a session on cloud computing. Our mentor helped a lot to make it happen. A new chapter of my ambassador journey began after I reached the beta milestone. I shared my achievement on social media. It is an excellent practice which motivates colleagues in your network. I continued participating in social impact projects as it improved my skills and introduced me to new enthusiastic friends living in different continents of the world. One of my projects was a blog series on Power BI and machine learning. I met many like-minded people while working with them on these projects. It was an opportunity of a lifetime. Microsoft offered Credly badges in recognition of each member’s contribution. I’m passionate about learning new technologies and applying them in solving real world problems. Therefore I utilized my spare time to learn and certified my competency in tech. The program offered me an opportunity to take the AZ-900 azure fundamentals exam for free. So, I referred to all the materials available on the learn page and went through linkedin learning courses relevant to the topic as preparations. I have shared my experience taking AZ-900 on medium as a separate blog. In the latter part of the year 2022, I actively volunteered as an organizing team member of the Microsoft Ignite community lead after party of Sri Lanka, which was conducted as a hybrid event. Since the beginning of the planning phase, I worked with the Gold ambassadors of the community and shared and discussed my addons. I took the responsibility to share the event details among my university students. I used mostly social media and word of mouth. I found many potential candidates for the coming cohort who helped me to spread the news. In the physical event I gave my contribution as a track owner. Azure Infrastructure and Security was my track, and I had the responsibility to make that track an insightful one. It was challenging hence, this was the first event I contributed physically after the long break of covid-19 for two years. Reaching out to the speakers was one of my duties at the day. Some speakers participated physically and virtually from several parts of the globe. One of our MVPs joined from the Netherlands virtually. The full transition of the event raised some novel challenges but they were manageable with the help of my team. For folks who wanna join us, apply here https://lnkd.in/gWwDR-Vc and be a force for good.
Thank you !
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AuthorI'm Asiri. Electronic engineering Student. Archives
April 2023
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