Google Developers Student Clubs (DSC) were originally created by Google Developers as an initiative to give university students access to various resources for helping them grow as developers. While originally these organizations were primarily in India, Indonesia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in 2019 Google Developers expanded the program to many countries around the world, including the US. In fall of 2019, DSC at UCLA was founded to give UCLA students access to the unique resources and community that Developer Student Clubs provide.
By joining, you have the opportunity to not only learn development skills, but also apply it towards real challenges in the community by developing solutions, and then showcasing your work for local leaders. You also can get to develop your portfolios by working on projects that have real applications rather than academic-only projects. DSC does this by hosting workshops, guest speakers, hackathon-like solutions challenges and other events.
Below is a brief description of some of the types of events DSC has:
- Workshops
- DSC organizes and facilitates workshops on campus to provide students with technical development skills.
- DSC Solutions Challenge
- Students get the opportunity to apply their skills for a real problem sourced from the local community (sourced by the DSC community). In addition to development skills, the students gain problem solving skills as they understand more about the problem and are developing a solution using technology, along with communication skills as they learn how to ask questions to better understand the problem.
- Showcases
- The students will present the solutions in campus and regional showcases, thus gaining visibility and inspiring more students to learn and apply development skills.
- Meetups
- Monthly and/or Quarterly: DSC leads meeting that encourage students to meet, share and support and learn from each other.
- Conferences and other learning and development (L&D) opportunities
- The DSC might have opportunities to attend conferences, workshops and other L&D opportunities. They will be supported with invites, passes, travel grants and mentoring opportunities.
- Grow the local community
- DSC is connected with members of Google and the Google Developers communities (Google Developer Groups, Google Developer Experts, Google Business Groups, etc.) & other programs including Women Techmakers Scholars, Interns, Alumni of the former Google Student Ambassador program, Facilitators of Applied CS program, etc. Collaborations are encouraged to support each other.