Jakub's Sun Blog: Sun Campus Ambassador, LMU

A few people asked me what does Sun Campus Ambassador actually do. Although a quick Google search would give you a picture too, let me summarize the point.

There are about 700 Sun Campus Ambassadors all over the world.  They are students and temporary Sun employees whose responsibility is to promote open-source technologies from Sun, and try to create and foster a community of students interested in Sun technologies but also in open-source in general.

How do they do it? They organize tech demos in which they introduce open source technologies such as OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, Java, NetBeans, MySQL, OpenOffice, and many other. They also help students to connect with other students through a special student social network called OSUM (Open Source University Meetup) - there is an OSUM group for each university which has a Sun campus ambassador.

 Students benefit from campus ambassadors' work in other ways too. Sun has a whole program targeted at universities and education called Sun Academic Initiative. Through participation in this program, students gain free access to various web-based courses and have a possibility to get a discount on Sun certification exams. Is the certification worth it? Well, that depends. You would certainly need to refresh your knowledge and study a bit to get certified (in Java, Solaris administration, ..., ...) and certified programmers, developers and administrators are more likely to have a higher salary than is the average salary of their peers  (a statistic I found says that it is 8.3% more for programmers, 14.3% more for developers, and 31% more for administrators, but it was only a quotation and I can't find the original source now..). Anyway, it is certainly a nice addition to a student's CV who does not have much Java experience from industry.

 You can find more information about Sun activities for student developers at http://developers.sun.com/students/campus.jsp

 If you are from LMU then you can also look forward to the first tech demo there which will take place in room 0.43 in Oettingenstraße on May 11 and will introduce NetBeans. 

Stay tuned for a post about student competitions and welcome to the new semester! :)