How I Heard About The Program
I first heard of this program from LinkedIn and after visiting their website, I realized the perks were too enticing not to apply. Before applying, I had watched quite a few application videos that got accepted and read some blogs online.
What is MLSA Program?
The Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors program is a global group of on-campus ambassadors who are eager to help students and their communities, lead in their local tech circles, and develop technical and career skills for the future. As a Student Ambassador, you might find yourself organizing a campus or community hackathon, mentoring other students, or volunteering with an elementary school STEM class.
Advantages Of Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors Program
As an ambassador, you get to enjoy many benefits whiles you learn and skill yourself as well as sharing your knowledge with others. Some perks of being a MLSA include:
- Being part of an amazing community
- Outstanding experience to add to Resume
- Access to Microsoft Products (Microsoft Office, Visual Studio Enterprise etc.)
- Free Domain name
- Live hands call with the leads of MLSA program and community
- Access to Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors Summit
- Techsmith products
- Microsoft Technical Certification (MTC) voucher
- LinkedIn learning
- Swag box
- Mentorship program
- Guidance from experts
- Opportunity to organize and conduct events
- Meets people around the world with common passion as yours
How To Apply For Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors Program
Application for the MLSA program is opened throughout the year and is reviewed on quarterly basis. Application deadline for the next cohort will be around November 31st and the results will be out by January.
Eligibility Requirement
All applying students must
Be at least 16 years old at the time of submission
Be enrolled full time in an accredited academic institution (e.g College, University)
Have valid identification
Steps To Apply
Visit the student ambassadors website
Sign-in to your Microsoft Account. If new, then create one
Click on Apply Now
Read the notifications, this will give you information about when your application will be reviewed
- Read and accept the privacy and terms and click on next
Fill out your personal information carefully
Fill your school/college info section
Now you're in the most important part of the application. In this section, you'd be required to answer three questions on the topics Inspire, Teach and Promote. You'd be required to answer any one of your choice with a video(under 2 mins) and the other two with essays. You can upload your video to YouTube, google drive or OneDrive and paste the link in the space provided. For instance, I answered Promote with a video and wrote an essay on Teach and Inspire
Your Social Media presence is also key when applying to the MLSA program
Finally, you'd have to select the technologies which interest you
Step 8 will require sufficient time to answer these three questions, so don’t think of submitting it in a single day. Think deeply, collect the relevant points, summarize them and make sure your answer is within the word limit. This part has a strong contribution to your application decision. Apart from these, you must have a decent profile on GitHub, Stack Overflow, and LinkedIn. Having a personal website and technical blogs or videos will give you an edge over other candidates.
My Application
It took a lot of weeks researching how I could present my ideas into writing. My friends helped a lot on my application by sharing their views and proofreading my essays.
Inspire
I basically talked about how I helped my colleagues with some programming skills and my plans of helping my community in the near future.
From our part of the world(Ghana), computer skills are rare to find in the majority , with the majority of the population being illiterates, these knowledge about computers are hard to imbibe. The above is the reason why I took upon myself to share my dynamic programming abilities, combined with my great public relations skills and organized a Python programming tutorials for my colleagues who could not continue from junior high and senior high school and some members from my college as well. This was to give them hope of a bright future in computing even if they couldn’t move up the academic ladder and to let them know that these were basic skills for all once you can read and write and have interest in it. And also taught them how to surf the Internet for these programming skills. One time the need came for me to host a twitter space and educate the people available about the importance of programming and data science, which saw 6 people contact me asking for sites and applications they could use to learn them. Finally, I’m looking forward to help the ladies in my community, who are into business or retail business with data processing apps that will serve as their administrator and run every mathematics that needs to be done by inputting the data to be processed, to facilitate effectiveness at their places of work.
Teach
Here, I highlighted three main ways I would use to explain a technical concept to a friend and I used OOP as an example.
Teaching as I understand, is a way of understanding what is meant to be delivered and how the learner can comprehend with relative ease. With the above understanding, I will start off by linking the concept of what is to be taught to the person's experiences or everyday life. The use of examples that relate to an individual helps him or her to understand what is been taught. I would use what I know about the person to demonstrate how the concept is useful/interesting for them and this helps to draw their attention and gives better insight. Further on, another way to teach a concept is to relate the environment of the person to the subject being taught, say I have to explain Object Oriented Programming to a friend who is an automobile engineer, I will relate the car to be an object, the color as the attribute, the speed as a method (function) and so on. With this I explain the concept of Object Oriented Programming with his or her environment. Notes that are given during classes, are for students to refresh their minds of what has already been taught. So I will give follow-up resources and recommendations, eg. Tutorial sites, blog posts, books etc to help the person refer.
Selected ? What Next ?
After being selected into the program, you'll receive an email to complete your onboarding on the student ambassadors website. You'd have to download Microsoft teams on your PC or mobile phone where all information about the program is sent.
New Student Ambassadors Roadmap
After being invited to the program, you would be required to engage in leagues and attend monthly league events. You would have to complete a learning path on Microsoft Learn to advance to the Alpha stage.
Milestones In The MLSA program
In the program, you are to grow your skills using Microsoft Learn an also organizing events and sharing your knowledge with your community. The image below describes the various milestones you can earn with Gold Ambassador being the highest.
That is about it, I hope I could clarify your doubts on how to become a MLSA and hopefully, we can work together soon!
Thanks for reading and have a great one!