GitHub Campus Experts: Learning with Students

PJ: Okie dokie. Hi, I'm PJ Metz. I'm here to talk about the GitHub campus experts programme. So we call this learning with students. I've always felt that education was a two-way street. You learn just as much from them as they learn from you if you're doing the job right? And I want to talk about my history first. So first off, I'm currently, my title is Programme Manager of Student Communities, but my big job is running the Campus experts programme. I do a bunch of other stuff as well, but the main job is helping this particular community out. Previously I did education DevRel at GitLab, and after that I did a little bit of community work for a cybersecurity company called Project Discovery. So this is my tech background, but before that, I was a high school English teacher for 11 years. I thought I was going to do it for the rest of my life until someone showed me what they made at Microsoft as a DevRel.

And I went, well, that's interesting. I taught high school literature ESOL in South Korea for kids about four years old to 17. So I went from teaching about major motifs in the Great Gatsby to days of the week, which was a bit of whiplash. I also, in my spare time as a teacher, and by spare time I mean the summer, I taught summer school, PE, math, I actually taught a class called Mass Media where I taught kids how to analyse film and TV and music. I also did a life skills class where I taught resume writing and stuff like that. I taught a class called avid, which is a short for achievement via individual determination. And the whole point of that class was taking kids who are like BC students like middle of the road and giving them the tools that they need to be successful in higher level courses.

So this is me at GitHub Universe last year, but this is me in my old job thinking about grading. And this is actually my last year as a teacher is when I took that picture. I didn't leave because I hated grading. I actually really, really liked teaching full transparency. I would've stayed in teaching if I'd been making 40% more money, but I ended up leaving for a more lucrative career. It's not all about the money because when I was a teacher, we used to get super excited about people donating stuff to us. So this is me excited that I was going to have expo markers that year because otherwise I wasn't sure how I was going to have expo markers. Okay, so first I'm going to introduce what the Campus Experts programme is. So we have kind of a baseline and you can understand what it is.

You may have heard about students, you may have met a campus expert or two who's here today. So ask around. But we're also going to talk about how we operate. Two of these are about your heart and the heart way we operate, and two of them are about the head and the sort of way that we think about what it is we do more practically for the students. And then after that, I'm going to have a small playbook. Really, this whole thing is kind of a playbook of advice that I have in running a community like this. But let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to quickly talk about GitHub Campus experts. They are student community organisers. They are organising technical events on their campus, and their whole goal is to help bridge the gap between industry and the classroom. As many of you know, go get your four year degree and you show up for your job.

I don't think it matters what industry you're in. You show up for your job and they start asking you to do stuff and you have no idea what that stuff is necessarily, and you have to learn a lot on the job. So what these students are doing is they're recognising there are a lot of small skills, things like version control, things like popular frameworks that aren't necessarily being taught in classrooms, and these students are trying to fill that gap themselves by teaching other students on campus about those skills. These are very, very important skills that you would hope a junior would have coming into your company, but they're just not actually taught in universities because they do a lot of deep learning in university. So their whole deal is building diverse, excuse me, and inclusive spaces where anyone is welcome as long as they want to learn.

And so the central idea of a campus expert is someone who wants to help other people learn something that they already know. Being a campus expert is all about helping your community to grow. And whether it's open source or your favourite developer tool or framework, if you're a campus expert, you're getting support from the GitHub education team in running these events. So they're organising events about the types of skills and knowledge that is not often covered, and the whole programme when they run these events is tech agnostic. We are not an ambassador programme. They are not GitHub student ambassadors. They are campus experts and what they're an expert in can range. I have a student in Scotland who's doing accessibility for deaf people in video game development. I have kids doing quantum computing. I have kids doing a whole bunch of stuff that I'm extremely uncomfortable learning about because it makes me feel really, really dumb, but they're out there making a difference and I just want to support them in helping them reach people.

GitHub's kind of lucky in that we are kind of at the centre of a lot of what other people are doing, and we are very fortunate that we can be a tech agnostic student programme because even if they're teaching about Kubernetes or all these other things, at the heart of it, they're probably still using GitHub. We're running a hackathon and it's all about machine learning and ai. Open up a repo and let's get started. They're going to be using GitHub naturally, so we feel lucky that we can not only support them in whatever it is that they're doing and they're excited about, but they're going to do some GitHub naturally. Here's how we support them very specifically, we give them increased access to developer tools through the student developer pack and the student developer pack is available to any student. If you want to learn more about that, come and talk to me later or talk to Morgan.

Hi Morgan, shouting you out. We offer monetary support in the form of reimbursing them for events that they run. So they run an event. We have an agreed upon budget that will reimburse them and we give them money back after they spend it. We send them of course swag. No community is complete without a billion stickers and whatever else we can give them. And we give them a community of like-minded students to connect with. They get to build off of each other, connect with each other, and become stronger community organisers because they're surrounded by other strong community organisers. Iron sharpens iron. They are all over the world. We have 230 campus experts. I know with this projector, it's a little hard to see. There is an outline of the map right there, and you can kind of see South America down there, but this big glob right here, India, 30% of our students are in India.

I love it. Every single kid that applies from India is the most excited kid I've ever met in my life, and it makes me so happy and excited to see other people excited about helping folks. We just hit 500 total campus experts all time recently, and in 2024, we had 375 campus expert run events and that reached an expected total of about 200,000 students. How do we operate? What are our operating principles? The first one is empathy. Empathy is something that is deeply important to me. It's how I connect to other people. I think that empathy is the first thing for every organisation that they should be considering. And in order to talk about empathy, I'm going to talk about the Breakfast Club because obviously for those of you who don't know, the Breakfast Club is a movie from the eighties about a high school in Schirmer, Illinois where five students are at a Saturday school for variety of things that they did wrong.

For many of the kids, it was actually their first time getting in trouble. But in that movie, there's a character, he's the assistant principal and he's in charge of Saturday school that day, and he is awful. He's mean to the kids. Every kid, he's almost like a prison warden where he's sure that they're a terrible person and sure that they've done something awful and he treats them like that. I already loved this movie, but back when I was a teacher, I used to purposely watch it every year to remind myself not to become that assistant principal and to remember that these kids are real people with real problems. I brought that into the classroom all the time. I taught English. The order of operations for homework goes math, science, whatever class you had, that's a humanities where it's just answering a question. When did the war of 1812 occur?

That's right, 18, 15. And then at the end it goes, what did I have for English? Read two chapters. It is now 10 45 at night. The kid had a club after school practise. After that, sometimes a job, they get to 10 30 and it's time to read chapter four and five from Lord of the Flies. They're opening SparkNotes. So I stopped assigning it and I would tell them, I'm like, you don't have to read for homework. We're going to read in class because I know y'all are busy. They are busy and they're stressed. And on top of that, people are constantly telling them, wait till you have a mortgage. Wait till you have a real job. They're stressed now and it's hard. And I was able to access a lot more kids by saying, you do have a hard life. I know you're busy. And giving them that understanding and that empathy, they were able to trust me more and I didn't do it because they wanted to trust me.

I did it. I was empathetic. I remembered being 17 and having my mom say, you're not going to get into college with grades like that. My dad saying, when are you going to grow up? And I love my parents to death, but that was stressful and difficult. I bring that same empathy to this student programme that I'm running. These students are all over the world and they are facing a job market that is increasingly making it harder and harder and harder for them to get in. And now in the past two years, AI shows up things like Devin, every one of my students. At some point when Devin came out and was like, no, Devin, the AI developer, every kid was like, is this my job? Am I watching this disappear in front of me? So they are stressed about things and I use that to connect with them.

So this is something I pulled from when I was a teacher, and I think it's really useful for us as well. They don't care what until they know that you care, show that you care for your student community beyond the tech, beyond the thing that you are doing with them. That is a business case. I think that's a really great place to start and just understand who these kids are. So my advice here is talk to students without a pitch. Just listen to them. Listen to their problems. After you do that, it's time for my second favourite thing in the world, transparency. And I think even at the start of this, I said full transparency. It's one of my favourite things to say. In fact, if you search on my discord for the word transparency, a bunch of posts from me show up saying like, Hey, I made a mistake, or Hey, this is taking longer than I thought.

Or, Hey, I just want to be honest with You'all. Something's going on and I need to talk to you about it very briefly, and I very, very open about it, especially when I make a mistake or something on our end went wrong. It's really tempting to when something goes wrong, just be like, well, we'll just wait and see what happens here, I guess. And oh, they found out all right. Hey, turns out y'all found out about the thing, so let's talk to you about it. I try and be open ahead of time and I try and create trust with my community by being transparent. I actually, I have full proof this works. We had a student who was offboarding. He's graduating and moving on to his career now, and I was in this offboarding interview with him and I go, so what's something about campus experts now since you got here that you think has been going well?

He goes, you are so transparent about everything. And I go, I'm giving a talk in a week, and I talk about transparency. You're in the talk. Thank you, Joe Ash, you're amazing for helping me out and making this talk real. So my advice, being honest at the start about what you will and won't do or what your programme is or isn't is the very first step. We are not an ambassador programme. We do not want students to only talk about GitHub. We are not the end all, be all of tech, and I refuse to pretend that my job is to get more students using GitHub. My job is to maintain a community and to help these students get what they need out of it. So if someone's like, Hey, we need more kids using GitHub, what are you doing about it? I'll be like, I mean, it's kind of naturally happening, but that's not what I focus on.

If I focus on building a good community with good student leaders who help each other and I encourage them with the right tools, they're going to help other kids use GitHub. We don't require that they teach GitHub, but I'll tell you what every single campus expert does for their first event, GitHub 1 0 1. I'll tell you what, every single hackathon run by a CE has a session about how to use GitHub. It's kind of automatic. They're not just spreading the word about GitHub and copilot. They're talking about Kubernetes, open source, data science, ai, LLMs, their favourite framework and a bunch of other stuff. I don't know very well, but they do. Now, to be very transparent, like I said, we do set them up with the materials to make it easier to teach GitHub. We do encourage them to use copilot and encourage other people to use copilot.

We do have that inside of our wheelhouse, but it's not the only thing I tell them all the time about the truth of our programme. This is some extreme transparency. The truth about a student developer programme is that we are encouraging students to learn to use our product earlier so that when they show up at a company, they show up and they say, yeah, I use this. And they go, all right, it looks like the kids are using this. Let's get it. MLH has told you, I think a few times on this very stage at MLH run hackathons, 51% of the students who graduate from the MLH programme and go on to work have introduced something they learned at an MLH event into production. That's the business case, and I'm honest about that. Yeah, there's a reason I'm trying to encourage teenagers and students to use GitHub.

It makes you want to use GitHub, but I don't care about that side as much. I get to focus on the community themselves and I get to focus on helping them build, and then this is kind of a happy byproduct of that. So what do we do? Transparency by default. Radical honesty with your community builds trust and radical honesty is the only way to make sure you're not being a liar. Essentially, kids will rip you apart for lying or being a little bit deceptive. All right. These next two things are about, we talked about the heart empathy and transparency, and now it's about the head, the network effect. So we are looking at this beautiful universe, and if you're looking to grab a point on here that's going to connect to a bunch of other ones. Let's imagine this as the metaphor for students. Do you want the student that's up here and has a couple connections or do you want student in the middle that seems to know everybody?

We rely on the network effect of our community members to spread the word about what we offer, what GitHub education offers to all students, and there's an expectation that they're running enough events that they reach that number of people. Our network effect we estimate is about one to 200 For every student we have, they reach about 200 people. I have seen students run hackathons where there's like 800 participants in the hackathon and every single one of those kids is getting a learn how to use GitHub workshop out of it. We also encourage students to go beyond computer science, and we tell them that that is part of creating a diverse community. I myself obviously know tech background. Sometimes I'll be in a conversation and people will be like, oh, remember college computer science? And I'll be like, sure. I was reading 17th century metaphysical poetry.

It was different. We tell them there's value in GitHub and value in tech in general, and the skills that they're learning for multiple disciplinary backgrounds. And so we encourage them to go beyond the computer science students, talk to kids in the humanities, talk to the business students especially. They'd be interested in learning about this. Now, I'm now thinking about Ricky's keynote today when he was doing the Kenny demo, like just doing a Kenny style demo with a person who's never touched code can be massively, massively rewarding for that person. I know when I wrote my first Hello world, I was blown away by what I was capable of. All of a sudden it opened up a world for me I never knew of including this stage, which is kind of cool. You can't reach everyone, so reach people who reach others and give them the tools that help them reach others.

We train our students on things like giving a workshop, giving a talk, how to connect with people, and we encourage them to talk to each other about what works and doesn't work. So enable your fans to make more fans by giving them the training they need to make that happen. You got to get the right people. This talk came about because Swift and I were talking and he was like, there's a lot of people trying to figure out how to make a student community and how to get them out there, and I imagine a bunch of VPs out there going, we didn't computer science students get 'em. And this is not really a winning strategy unless your tool is hyper developer specific. If only a computer science student needs it, sure, maybe. But you also don't want just any computer science student. Who are you looking for specifically?

Who do you need in your community? Decide who you're looking for craft personas and go after those personas in campus experts. I want community builders. I want kids who are focused on other people, on people who care about how other people succeed. It is a act of service in my mind, which really resonates with me. I'm big on service. It's my love language. I'm always getting my wife treats and helping her doing anything I can for her. So I try and encourage that same act of service in my students by modelling it for them. You know who I don't really need? I'm learning every single framework just in case I need it kid. I don't need the kid who built their first server in the third grade out of a bunch of scraps they found in a cave, like some kind of Tony Stark. I don't need that kid unless they also care about community.

If your kids that are trying to join a community are simply interested in what they're going to get out of it, that's probably not the one that we need. So specifically, who do you need in your community? Who are you looking for and why are you looking for that person? There's been a lot of talk at various talks at this very conference about the importance of setting yourself up beforehand, of writing the script before the video. 60% of the work for a video I heard, I think it was Kevin Blanco said Yesterday happens beforehand. You have to be ready to prepare and know what you're looking for. If you're just going out looking for computer science students, you're going to find a bunch of kids who don't necessarily fit what it is that you need. All right, onto the playbook. Now, like I said, these kind of things are part of the playbook too, but these were more just me explaining my operational philosophy.

But three more things to keep in mind as you navigate working with a student community. The first is, what is the actual value for students? What do they get out of being a part of your community? The next is, originally I wrote people versus data, and you'll see why, but I crossed it out and put, but I wanted to keep the fact that initially I thought people versus data, and then it's more than just the community manager and it's more than community at its heart. Let's talk about these three things really quick. First off is the value. You need to give these kids something valuable that isn't measured with just a dollar sign. If the thing you're offering them is free access to your product, that is table stakes. Obviously, if you have a student community, you're going to give them your product for free or at least some part of your product for free.

What's the next thing you're giving them? Are you giving them mentorship? Are you giving them access to people in industry? Are you giving them opportunities to better themselves and their community? Because remember, these are students who are interested in building community. Are you giving them space to learn? And the most important part about a space to learn is a space to make mistakes. And are you giving them an actual good product? And this is something I think about. Like I said, it's table stakes to be like, yeah, of course you get the product, but is it valuable? Is it good? Is it something they need? Or are you convincing them that this product is going to fix some problem they're having and it's not actually, and you're just eager to get in on the ground floor with some students. So you can't just be like you get some free stuff and expect a community to show up. Even just stickers. We all love stickers, obviously, but it can't be just that. There has to be something truly valuable about the community itself in order for them to stick around people and data.

I am driven by interactions with people. I am extremely empathetic and I care very, very deeply about my students. And that's something that's been true ever since I first started teaching in 2009 for a story. We try to bring campus experts to two events each year. We try and bring them to GitHub universe. We get a bunch of campus experts that we bring from all over the world, and we try and bring them to ml H's Hack Con. And this year, it's feeling a lot harder to bring kids into America for a variety of reasons. And I've had to have conversations with students where I have to look at them and I have to say, I need you to know you need to feel comfortable travelling to the United States right now. And it is heartbreaking because I've had a few kids go, I have to think about it.

I have no control beyond voting and activism about what the current administration does or doesn't do as far as their immigration and border policy. However, it affects me. Someone once explained to me, pj, your politics or anything that gets in the way of you helping other people is bad. I was like, that sounds about right. And so I very, very emotionally invested in all of these 230 campus experts. I have cried over not being able to deliver something for them or messing something up for them. But what we need to prove that programmes are working and the business case to prove that programmes are useful is data. And so my advice is you need someone who loves and wants the best for the community, but then above or beside that person, you need someone who's focused on data. My previous manager and my current manager both helped me really understand the importance of data.

There was a talk earlier downstairs about how to talk to people about what it is that your org provides and what you do. And it's sometimes dollar signs, it's sometimes impressions, but you need numbers and proof that things are working. But for the community to thrive, you need someone who's going to cry about it sometimes, if that makes sense. So it's people and data, someone who cares deeply about people and someone who can help the person who cares deeply about people. Also bring up data once in a while. It is way beyond the community. This programme has been running for nearly 10 years now, and there have been so many amazing programme managers before me that it was extremely intimidating the day I showed up and knowing who I was coming in behind and who was in front of them and who was in front 'em.

It's had so many people at the helm, and each of them has contributed something really critical and beautiful to the programme. So I stand on the shoulders of giants for this programme right now, but in addition to just me, I have a huge team of education and I cannot run campus experts without help from every single person here on the education team. It is not possible. I rely on all of them for a variety of different things. I'm constantly pinging them in Slack, asking questions, begging for help, and they're all amazing. So if you're looking to start a student programme, it shouldn't be one person, it should be a team, and they should all be focused on one thing, making students' lives better. My goal is to help students learn something that helps them get a job later because it's hard out there. I even encourage them to, this is being recorded. I even encourage them to learn how to use GitLab because what if they go to get a job somewhere and that whole company just uses a completely different version control system. Go learn it. Don't stop yourself from achieving something, but I need this team in order to do that. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. That's my talk on PJ Metz. Hang out with me, chat with me. Thank you so much for coming. Enjoy the rest of decon.