Lessons I learned as a GitHub Campus Expert

More than a year ago, I finished college. With all the challenges and opportunities that this accomplishment means to my life, this also means that now I’ll be transitioning from GitHub Campus Expert to GitHub Campus Expert Alumni.

My time as a student wouldn’t have been the same without the communities' impact on my career. Thanks to the tech communities, I’ve had the opportunity to live unique experiences, travel to different countries, give talks at local and international events, meet people I deeply admire, and challenge myself numerous times; As a late closure of this stage of my life, I want to share with you some of the most memorable moments that I’ve had during this road and the lessons that I learned. Hopefully, they can also help you on your road.

I joined a tech community for the first time (Pioneras Dev 🧡) in 2016 because a friend from University (Cami G 👩‍💻) invited me. I immediately felt so engaged that I attended a second and a third time, and then I started helping with small staffing tasks like helping with the snacks, organizing chairs, and the setup for the speaker. I gave my first talk and progressively acquired more responsibilities until becoming part of the organizing team, and then even created a community and organized events.

This process helped me to learn not only about organizing tech events but also a more significant lesson that I apply in all my projects:

✨ START SMALL

Sometimes we get frustrated because we want to run big events and speak at huge conferences from the beginning, but starting with baby steps helps us build the confidence and skills needed to do it on a bigger stage.

This also helped me when I was building my community at college; recruiting members for the organizing team is challenging. Still, when we start delegating small tasks to different people, they can gain the confidence to become leaders later.

Two years later, I won a scholarship to participate in JSConf Europe in Germany; I was thrilled to have this opportunity, but at the same time, I was TERRIFIED because it was going to be my first international trip (I’m from Colombia); I was traveling alone, I don’t speak German, and I didn’t feel that my English was good enough to survive in a different country. Even with all the insecurities I had, I made this trip. It was a wonderful experience, and that’s when I learned that I could not let fear stop me.

✨ DON’T LET FEAR STOP YOU

If you feel afraid of doing something, just do it. In the worst scenario, you are just going to learn how not to do something.

After returning from this event, I was so inspired that I decided to create a tech community at college to discuss web technologies. We didn’t do it right from scratch, made many mistakes, and needed to re-invent the community and iterate over what we were not doing right. Eventually, the work I was doing with this community allowed me to become a GitHub Campus Expert; it’s not possible to predict the future and the opportunities you are going to have as a consequence of the things you are building today; you should just do one thing at the time. And as we’ve probably heard a lot of times:

✨ PROGRESS, NOT PERFECTION

We often get stuck in certain areas just because we are afraid of not doing it right, and in the end, we make more progress doing one little thing every day than waiting a year to do a big one. If you want to create a course, organize an event, or speak in a meetup, just go for it, start one step at a time, even if it’s not perfect, all the lessons you learn will help you improve it next time.

And to close up, one of the biggest lessons that I’ve had, I learned even before starting in the tech industry, but I realized it years later:

✨ NEVER UNDERESTIMATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE

In high school, we had a class about programming where we learned how to do basic HTML, not CSS, JS, or any kind of algorithms, just HTML. You don’t need to be a web expert to explain how to add a title and an image on a website, but this teacher completely changed my life because he opened my world to a career that I hadn’t even considered, and I feel I couldn’t have made a better choice for my career.

So don’t let the impostor syndrome underestimate everything you know; you don’t need to wait until feeling like an expert to share what you already know because some people don’t have that knowledge, and you can have a massive impact on their life by sharing it.

And remember

✨ YOU ARE NOT ALONE

There are companies, communities, and mentors willing to give you a hand. Programs like GitHub Campus Experts are great spaces to develop the necessary skills to become a better leader and exchange experiences.

I definitely recommend GCE after being part of it, but there are different ambassador programs for students, and you can join the one that better suits your goals.