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Student Ambassadors

Former Member
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Greetings all,

I've been forming an idea in my mind for a few months as to how to support time pressured faculty with teaching saupport whilst also benefiting the global program by raising the visibility of the UA program among students and within the UAC community in particular and I've been struck by one idea which is in a (very) early stage - that of student ambassadors.

It's a simple concept and in fact the inspiration came from watching a presentation about the STAR students from St Joseph's University in the US. Here students were given the opportunity to raise their SAP skills level and become a teaching resource at the same time as developing their CVs and being able to get better jobs.

I have spoken with some of my faculty about them doing something similar but to retain a degree of consistency instead the universities would only have one or two such students and refer to them as SAP Ambassadors or similar. This is not to suggest that SAP would be employing these students or supporting them as par tof SAP's operations - rather it could be a title that a selected one or two top students perhaps at the end of the first term or semester would be allocated in return for agreeing to act as a teaching resource, act as a promotional evangelist within their univerity student community, and act as a recruiter for students to the UAC/SDN community.

This is only a thought but so far around a dozen of my schools expressed an interest (market research is always a good idea) if sucha concept ws realised. I have to stress this is only my own personal idea and it is only something I am taping the interest of thus far - but I'd be interested in feedback?

Martin

Martin Gollogly

Director, University Alliances

United Kingdom and Ireland

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Answers (1)

Answers (1)

Former Member
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Hello Martin,

Microsoft has a similar program which our university participates in. It works well for promoting Microsoft and Microsoft activities within our department. A student is selected as the "Microsoft Student Ambassador" and typically hosts several activities throughout the semester. An example might be a student programming competition hosted by the Ambassador. Microsoft typically provides this invidual with various 'prizes' or 'incentives' that can be distributed according to certain guidelines. Two years ago everyone in the department received Microsoft frisbees. Last year it was Microsoft tote bags. In addition, at a programming competition the grand prize winner was awarded a copy of Vista Ultimate Edition, a couple of others won copies of Microsoft Office, and there were a few other software prizes as well. All of the previous is provided by Microsoft free of charge. As a result of this, there are many activities our department does which have Microsoft as a sponsor. The student ambassador also does various presentations throughout the year at student groups.

On the SAP front, I'm not sure how this could work. I suppose SAP could distribute various items like pens, etc. to campuses to distribute to create publicity and an opportunity to discuss SAP, but it seems likely the UA program doesn't have the budget for that. Where Microsoft can give away software cheaply, there's not anything I can think of that would be parallel in the SAP world.

I do think that coming up with some mechanism to assist in the promotion of SAP activities within a college community is a good program to pursue. Involving students in this would relieve faculty from the need to constantly be driving these activities, and also be a good way to 'recognize' students with an item to place on their resume in the future.

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi Tony,

Wow - many thanks for that very informative reply. I hadn't realised there was a competitive program but I should have known that Microsoft would have done something similar. But I think you are right about budgets. I think that is mainly because for Microsoft Education is both a strategic development target as well as a major source of revenue. In fact I think about a quarter of of Microsoft's revenues come from Education which is why it is so crucial for them and why they have budgets for giveaways. It also certainly doesn't hurt that those same people use Office etc. at home so they will likewise be personal users so you're right we'd have our work cut out.

I think the first thing to offer would be the title if that was something we could convince SAP to support - even the title on its own might be a suitable incentive particularly if we created some kudos around there only being one or two Ambassadors per school. But I wonder if you might be right and having something else more tangible might be usefuly too. I guess this might be related to specific territories - if I could for example convince our MD to provide some UKI marketing freebies.

An alternative might be if I could convince our MD (just as an example) to provide some SAP training for being particularly successful Ambassadors. I suspect the former would be of greater interest to students - they would hopefully have received significant training already and particularly older students might already be looking for jobs. So freebies would certainly be of greater interest. I wonder...

I'm wondering what we could give away that, like Microsoft, is valuable to students but ironically doesn't cost anything for us to provide. Perhaps software from a partner. Or perhaps a title for all the Ambassadors but some form of special achievement recognition only open to them - perhaps as a result of recruitment to the UAC - that would be won by one student as your example did with Vista.

Hmmm...tricky one...

Martin