3) Drupal as a career choice through University Programs

Drupal is an awesome way to build a career. Many of us have been using Drupal for years and have built a career out of it. More University students need to be made aware that Drupal is hiring and Drupal is awesome. sure learning Assembly is fun.. for about 5 minutes.. but learning how to be a responsible web app that attracts tens of thousands or millions of users is just rocking awesome. The web is the future and our Universities are just now waking up to this fact.

Objectives (Why are we doing this?)
Drupal is awesome and we want to see more student choose Drupal as a career.

Funding Model

Underwrite: A sponsor program may not be feasible because the type of students who will be an Ambassador or join the DUG do not like being “marketed” to. It would be best if we had one or several companies underwrite this initiative.

Ideas, suggestions, and advice to meet this objective

The information stored below is information used to define the program above. It was ideas, suggestions, and advice given to us by staff,
http://dev.nodeone.se/en/drupalizing-a-web-project

Idea #1 On campus ambassadors

• Give them a kit to market to CS students.
• Present to class with a small workshop? What is Drupal, path to a career in Drupal, a little demo, ending with next steps showing resources, local meetups, etc
• Guerrilla tactics: hang up Drupal flyers that we provide
• Table: provide materials for them to promote Drupal (same message as class presentation)
• CS job fair program (we connect them with local shops)
• Having them post into Job fairs, job listings, etc.

What is needed to execute

• 1 program manager (same as Drupal in a Day person??)
• Marketing kit developed (print materials have a cost)
• Recruitment campaign to find on-campus ambassadors

Funded by: Ambassador Program: All materials will have sponsor logos on it. Sponsors can be local shops who are hiring and/or larger shops like Acquia. Focusing on local market around universities requires small print runs (more costly). Each university print material will have sponsor logos on it. Keynote for in-class or table presentation will have sponsor logos on it. Their materials will be at our table for job fair or they can come personally.

Idea #2 Internships
DA Program manager (and campus ambassador) coordinates internships between local shops and CS departments. Might be as simple as 1) finding out who manages university internship programs 2) finding out what internship requirements are (pay, so many work hours, fill out paper work, etc) 3) Making local shops aware of the program in their area, how it works, what they have to do to recruit an intern, types of projects that are good for interns. Then after we make the connection, we just get a report from university to see how healthy the traction is.
Curriculum.
Who KNOWS?? Is this a class? One week of a type of class. Is this a continue ed program at universities, community colleges? Who teaches?????

What is needed to execute

• Program Manager (same as Drupal in a Day or another resource/intern)
• marketing campaign to find internship coordinators at select schools
• Process to find local shops, communicate opportunity with them and connect them to university internship coordinator

Funded by: Internship: Ask for some $ from local shops to support our effort if they want to be in the local “internship program”. Program manager (or me - sales) will first have to reach out to shops. explain the program and value to them. Ask if they want easy access to intership program (we do the leg work, they just have to post job once we figure out all the steps for them). If they say, “yes, we want this”, then say OK there is a cost to join this program. Cost is $XXXX. It funds the person who will do this leg work for you.

Idea #3 Curriculum and educational materials
Work with Universities and training programs such as Stanford's free online education (http://www.cs101-class.org), the Khan academy (khanacademy.org), or Drupal Kata (http://drupalkata.com) to help build curriculum to be utilized everywhere.
What is needed to execute

• Program Manager (same as Drupal in a Day or another resource/intern)
• Relationships with talented Drupal trainers, speaker, etc.

Funded by: Underwriting?

Idea #4 Collaborate with faculty on curriculum and case studies
Influence the information systems curriculum and research in universities by engaging faculty and offering two benefits:

• Offering to provide guest lectures and short workshops on Drupal. This helps instructors make the curriculum more relevant to students. It also gives them insights into the local and regional development scene.
• Offering to connect faculty with people in the Drupal community who are implementing interesting projects. Connecting faculty with clients gives them access for writing up primary data (case studies) they need to conduct academic research. In order to get published, faculty need primary data in the form of case studies. Their problem is access to interesting projects. Most case studies about tech implementations are 3-5 years old. Inviting faculty to interview clients on significant Drupal projects opens doors in academia and gets Drupal in the curriculum. Faculty can't get enough of that stuff. Every significant Drupal project can open a door in academia by giving a researcher access to the client. And every case study becomes a reference for Drupal.

These two items must go together because the guest lectures establish a contact that is necessary to find the research needs of a faculty member. The local Drupalista will find the research needs of the professor, forward it on to the Drupal Assoc and coordinate contacts.

We're up against IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP who smother the universities with representatives handing out free software, t-shirts, etc. Here is a link to the IBM Academic Initiative. Faculty will respond favorably to a Drupalista who has no money, no t-shirts and no jobs but who can provide insight into the bazaar of open source commerce.

I'm too new in Drupal to know how to implement this on our end. We'll need at least a sign-up page for faculty to express their interest in being contacted and some sort of coordination so that we have an idea of who is calling on faculty at a particular university. I was a full-time representative for IBM to universities in 14 southern and central states in the US. I would very much enjoy getting back into this for Drupal. At this point, I'm self-employed and so would be willing to take a very active role in leading this.