This was not an everyday routine when I get up so early in the morning with my alarm clock bell at 6AM. Definitely it was not an usual morning. Thanks to Red Hat Pune site team to come up with such a fabulous initiative of University Connect. University Connect is an outreach effort in a nutshell. The Pune site team has figured out and short listed some good colleges in and around Pune, where interested speakers can go and reach out to the young, passionate crowd of students and share knowledge about Open Source, Fedora and many new technologies like OpenStack, Cloud, ManageIQ etc.

Arriving at D. Y. Patil College, Pune

This was going to be our very first visit to D.Y. Patil college. We gathered in office at 8 AM and we started our short trip (from Red Hat office in  Magarpatta City to D.Y. Patil college). It was quite a long drive. We reached college at around 10 AM. It is a beautiful college campus. I was feeling so fresh looking at the young student crowd.

Without wasting time, we went to the college auditorium where all the students gathered for the event. I was happy to see the auditorium was already full of the crowd which is the future of the technical industry.

Schedule and speaking arrangements

We were given the front seats. Arrangements were nice. College student volunteers were very active and so was the audience. We started the event with Rupali Talwatkar speaking about Red Hat and the University Connect. Satya talked about Manage IQ and Aziza took over the session with a small quiz later on. I have discussed about Fedora, Open Source and how to get involved in different Fedora projects. Students were all excited about the new technologies and Open Source. I have showed that FOSS Wave  too, from where they can get easily connected to IRC and mailing lists.

There was a huge crowd of students with lots of queries and some innocent doubts. It took us a while to handle all of them. We encouraged them to stay connected with us and to start with open source projects to contribute in. After a short discussion with faculty staff members for future, deeper meetings, we headed towards college canteen for most deserving food (our first meal of the day). After a quick meal break, we reached back to office in second half of the day.

Evaluating the response

Considering the very first visit, it was really a nice start. The mailing list to stay connected for the students is universityoutreach-pune@redhat.com. One can get subscribed to it by using the subscription page.