Fall 2012 during my last semester at the University of Illinois I wanted to give back to my school to help them build a more qualifying skill set for internships with Microsoft and other top companies. I decided to become active in our school’s Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) chapter by starting a Special Interest Group (SIG) called SIG-WIN, WIN signifying Microsoft Windows based platforms in the hopes that it would be continued after my departure. The goal of my last semester was to create a series of events to help students learn how to make Windows Phone 7.1 Applications. The series would come in the form of a competition and it was based on the XAP-Fest competition for Microsoft Interns the past summer 2012 where I created my first windows phone application Go Rails.
This required very extensive project management because I was the only person who owned this project. I had to work with the University to reserve rooms, coordinate with our Microsoft School Recruiter (Erin Zuehlsdorff), the ACM officers President Walter Dworak and Vice-President Tom Phillips, and the Bioengineering Organization Alliance (BOA) President Chaitra Kishore and Secretary Johnwesly Kanagaraj, I outlined a plan of execution, involving advertising and giving multiple speeches at the ACM and BOA general meetings. I arranged for the participants to have prizes for the winning application as well as for participation in the competition. The prizes were sponsored directly by Microsoft and was supplied by Erin. Additionally she flew out a Program Manager from Windows Phone Division to help me conduct office hours for the contestants to help them solve problems they have been encountering with building the apps.
At the end of the series we had a judging session where the contestants presented their work and the winner was determined by the program manager and I they then had the first choice to choose an Xbox game or Xbox Live membership for 1 year. You can check out pictures and blog posts by using the navigation bars on the right.
Stacking Opportuntity 