Hey Red Hat Academy Community!
Today is my last day as the Red Hat academy Intern and as sad as it is to leave I’m excited to get back to my classes and be the first Red Hat Academy Student Ambassador at ECU. I’ve learned so much over the summer and have really fell in love Red Hat and all of you guys who support and embrace the Academy program.
I’ve been involved in several cool projects in my internship and am very excited to see some of them take shape in the fall of this year. The Student Ambassador Program was probably one of the largest undertakings of the summer.
The Student Ambassador Program started as a simple idea for Red Hat to reach out to the students more directly. After doing some research, it seemed like an ambassador program would be the best platform to drive student engagement. We then took a deep dive into the logistics. We had to think about the benefits of such a program to the academic institutions involved, the professors, the students, and Red Hat. After going to pitch the idea to different people for support we answered: What would it do? What would a model student ambassador look like? How would you apply? Etc. With months of hard work and lots of help from people inside Red Hat and The Red Hat Academy program, we were able to deliver a solution to further bridge the gap between industry and students in academia.
As part of the Student Ambassador Program I built a Red Hat Academy GitHub organization to be used as a hub for Student Ambassador workshops. It will encourage collaboration between ambassadors at different schools and serve as a resource to be pulled from to supplement and dive interest in curriculum offered in the Red Hat Academy. The first workshop built on this platform was just a guide for using Git. The guide helps you learn how to contribute to RHA GitHub projects and even build projects of your own.
After the Git Guide I needed something that actually supplemented existing RHA curriculum and would help expose students to new Red Hat technologies that had classes at their schools. At the time I was running a small Minecraft server for a few friends and was looking for some ways to upgrade it. I had just gotten through DO180, the Docker Kubernetes and OpenShift class, and got the idea to deploy the server in OpenShift. After doing a bit of research on the idea I decided that that would be my next project, a workshop that goes over how to deploy a Minecraft server in OpenShift.
The project took about 3 weeks in total to complete. 1 week for research and development, another week for writing the guide, and the last week for revisions and editing. After it was done I started an email chain that talked about the project, the requirements, and it’s accessibility. We later talked about the scope of the project and eventually discussed how it could be deployed globally. As more people got involved and interested, things really started to blow up. One Monday morning I got an email from an executive at Red Hat asking for a demo of the project. In the end we decided that it would be awesome to have more of these kinds of projects to supplement our current curriculum offerings in the RHA. It was definitely humbling seeing something that I created gaining so much traction. I look forward to making more projects like that in the future.
Another big project that we worked on was the ECU Student Ambassador Kickoff Event. This Kickoff is meant to be a sort of golden standard for Student Ambassadors to follow and replicate. They will hold similar events at their schools all over the nation during through the first pilot of the Student Ambassador Program. I learned what it takes to setup these kinds of events and was able to leverage connections at my previous job in student affairs to smooth the process out. It’s a lot of work running events on campus but knowing the right people is very helpful..
It really was a bittersweet ending today while I was out with some other interns at our last get together. Once I got back I turned in my work laptop, and then my badge at the reception desk. It then hit me then that this really is the end of my internship. I can look back and say for certain that I had an awesome summer, and look forward to participating in the program I helped create as ECU’s First Red Hat Student Ambassador. It will be great to stay in touch with all of you as a student and I look forward to what we can accomplish together in the Red Hat Academy!
