My journey to becoming a GDSC Lead
When I was a sophomore, I heard that the Google Developer Student Clubs at the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City were about to recruit their very first core team members which were posted on the Faculty of Information Technology homepage. I filled out their form and submitted my CV for the position of a content writer and did not expect too much about the result.
Two weeks later, I received a congratulatory email and an invitation to join Slack - a workplace only for the club’s core team members at that time, and now we’ve expanded by allowing other members outside of the club to join our Slack too.
The first year of our club establishment was tough because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we all had to meet online and organize virtual events. That is also the biggest barrier we faced when marketing and communicating about our club's activities on social media.
There were very few people who knew about our activities at that time. But we always encouraged each other to get through a difficult time and we did it.
After a year of trying with effort, and 2 interviews, I was accepted to become the GDSC Lead in August 2022. I was surprised and happy when I received a congrats email. Beyond my expectations, I was also quite worried because our previous lead did a great job.
Our activities look back
2022 Info Session
With the participation of more than 400 students from the Faculty of Information Technology, this event is about introducing our club to new students (freshmen) at Orientation Day to get a better understanding of our community, purpose, activities, and benefits received from participating in GDSC.
Level Up Your Career - How to Improve Communication and Interview?
This is also the first-ever event I've organized since I officially became a GDSC Lead. "Level Up Your Career" is an event series that we intend to help students grow their careers was organized at A7 Hall, Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City late in October last year with over 300 attendees and 3 sessions from our special speakers:
• Ms. Nhi Nguyen, Community Manager - VietNam, The Philippines and Greater Mekong Developer Relations Ecosystem SEA, Google
• Ms. Ngoc Vo, Women Techmaker Ambassador, Software Engineer, VNG Corporation
• Mr. Le Van Thanh, Solution Architect, Google
Through this article, I want to say a big thanks to the Student Support & Counseling Center at the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City (IUH) for making this event to reality and other GDSC chapters for supporting us: University of Greenwich Can Tho, Sai Gon University, HCMC University of Technology and Education.
Not only stopping at CV writing skills, but in the future, the Level Up Your Career series will have more topics so that you can equip yourself with the necessary skills to develop your career in the future.
Our core team's weekly meeting
Our club has had a tradition of meeting every Thursday night since we established the club. This meeting helped us solve many of the club's concerns and come up with solutions (of course there are days that we just hang out and have fun together).
Support other local Google Developer Communities
To inspire and grow tech communities, we also collaborated with other local Google communities in Ho Chi Minh City to organize events such as Google I/O Extended 2022 by GDG Cloud HCM, Vietnam Andoird Day 2022 by Droidcon Vietnam, and DevFest 2022 by GDG HCMC & GDG Cloud HCM.
Final thoughts
Being a leader helps me improve myself by thinking, saying to act, and having more friends from different professional backgrounds with the same goal of growing community activities, and a lot of tech experts from companies like Google, or VNG.
Google Developer Student Clubs - IUH is my youth place to witness, growing up journey is what I strived for during my university years with my team.
About our Google Developer Student Club chapter
Google Developer Student Club at the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City (Nguyen Van Bao campus) is proud to be one of 26 universities across Vietnam participating in the Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) program in the term of 2022 - 2023.
Along with the goal of GDSC, our club intends to organize workshops relative to technologies, talk sessions with speakers who are experts in the technology industry and create an online community to promote the learning movement of our university’s students and help them in their careers.
“Google Developer Student Clubs helping students bridge the gap between theory and practice” - GDSC Goal