What's new with the Google Student Ambassadors?
Google announced its second Student Ambassador Program in the MENA-region on Thursday, in an attempt to find out how to help improving the educational infrastructure in the Arab World. Students from all over the Arab world travelled to Cairo to attend seminars and workshops, preparing them for what was to come.
The Google Student Ambassador (GSA) program recruits students to become the company’s representatives on-campus, and encourages them to organize events, tell other students about what Google is up to, and find new challenges within university-grounds.
This year, the company has 234 ambassadors all over the Arab world, compared to 72 last year. “We were very happy to find that 50% of these students were actually Egyptians. While evaluating the applications, we do not look at the nationality of the applicants, but rather on his skills and record; that is why we were surprised with the result,” Noha Salem, Google’s University Relations Manager for MENA explained during the launching event.
Last year, the GSAs organized more than 100 conferences and 20 local initiatives. The increase in number of ambassadors this year is what makes Google optimistic about what is to come. Wael ElFakharany, Regional Manager for Google MENA expressed his excitement: “This is our stake on the future. The students are the soul and future of the region and especially of this country, and that is why we invest in them. All of them want to develop themselves and their country, and this is what we need to create a positive ecosystem between Google and its users.”
The second run of the GSA program offered its ambassadors 60 hours of training in 35 workshops with Googlers from all over the world. The students seemed to find the information they were given useful and were happy about the togetherness they had experiencesd. Mohamed Fawzy, an Egyptian GSA, tweeted during one of the sessions: “It is great to see students from different countries and cultures cooperating to brainstorm event ideas.”
The Google Student Ambassador (GSA) program recruits students to become the company’s representatives on-campus, and encourages them to organize events, tell other students about what Google is up to, and find new challenges within university-grounds.
This year, the company has 234 ambassadors all over the Arab world, compared to 72 last year. “We were very happy to find that 50% of these students were actually Egyptians. While evaluating the applications, we do not look at the nationality of the applicants, but rather on his skills and record; that is why we were surprised with the result,” Noha Salem, Google’s University Relations Manager for MENA explained during the launching event.
Last year, the GSAs organized more than 100 conferences and 20 local initiatives. The increase in number of ambassadors this year is what makes Google optimistic about what is to come. Wael ElFakharany, Regional Manager for Google MENA expressed his excitement: “This is our stake on the future. The students are the soul and future of the region and especially of this country, and that is why we invest in them. All of them want to develop themselves and their country, and this is what we need to create a positive ecosystem between Google and its users.”
The second run of the GSA program offered its ambassadors 60 hours of training in 35 workshops with Googlers from all over the world. The students seemed to find the information they were given useful and were happy about the togetherness they had experiencesd. Mohamed Fawzy, an Egyptian GSA, tweeted during one of the sessions: “It is great to see students from different countries and cultures cooperating to brainstorm event ideas.”