My journey as an ExploreML Facilitator
Hello, everyone, My name is Santosh Vijapure and I’m going to share my journey as an exploreML facilitator for GoogleAI.
let’s just start with what is ExplroeML….
Explore Machine Learning (ML) is a Google-sponsored program for university students to get started with Machine Learning. The curriculum offers 3 tracks of Machine Learning Content (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) and relies on university student facilitators to train other students on campus. To help equip student facilitators to train others, Google hosts a series of Machine Learning Academies. Explore ML is a 2-day training experience for student facilitators to get familiar with the programs’ content, meet one another and connect to Googlers.
this may sound a little catastrophic and heavy but trust me, this is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.
It was all started in July the vacations are almost over and the first semester of the final year was about to start. on that random day, I received and text in our GDG WhatsApp group from Nikita Gandhi about ExlporeML opportunity. It was awesome.so I seamlessly applied for it. I knew the odds of me getting selected for this program something like 1 in ∞ .but guess what my application got selected. it one of the happiest moments of my life when I saw the confirmation email.
I was a little excited and a little freaked out. I had around a month for 2-day machine learning Bootcamp at Google Bangalore office. I covered a lot of ground for Machine learning in that month. our travel arrangements were made.
on the morning of 27th July, we flew to Bangalore. it was my first-time travel with the flight which was sponsored by Google. I enjoyed it. I get to see some beautiful views from up there it was so breathtaking and so colorful. I couldn’t resist taking a picture of it.
after we landed in Bangalore, we book a cab to the hotel. I meet some other students facilitator there and after breakfast, we went to Google office for the first day of Bootcamp. were wae had some wonderful speakers aligned for the whole 2-day one after another.
on the first day, we had speakers Nikita Gandhi, Aida Martinez, Abhishek Kumar, Amrit Sanjeev, Siddharth Agarwal and on the second day Mayank Grag, Ajinkya Kolhe, Biswajeet Malik.
These are some of the great speakers of all time. we’ve learned a lot in two days. made some great connections and had a great time with everyone.
and yes the food was so much tastier than anything else I’ve mentioned above :P
After spending two days in haven we flew back home with a package of great memories and infinite knowledge and great responsibilities as an exploreML facilitators. now it's our turn to do some magic and make all the efforts worth it.
after a couple of days, I scheduled my first machine learning workshop at my own college for second-year students.
Around 60+ students were present for day-1. I had a wonderful time facilitating them with machine learning. it was a little tough for me as I was speaking for the first time in front of 60+ students first 5–10 minutes were even harder for me but after that, I synced with the students very well and spoke around 2 hours flawlessly.
After a couple of workshops in my college, I was filled with a lot of confidence and I wanted to explore more and wanted to share my knowledge so I scheduled to talk in PythonPune meetup.
I've attended a lot of meetups but It was the first time I was attending meetup as a speaker. I always wanted to speak in the meetup and now its time. around 40 attendees were present at meetup some was a student and some were professionals it was a whole new level for me. I enjoyed giving a talk there as most of the crowd already knew the topics I was speaking about they were so responsive and the session was so interactive.
at last, I would like to thank GoogleAI for this wonderful opportunity and I would like to thank Nikita Gandhi for all guidance from the starting this program to the end. I would like to thank all the fellow facilitators for the wonderful journey together.
Thank you for your read :)
