Re: student outreach

Hi everybody,

On Dec 5, 2008, at 6:27 PM, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> If we can organise a mailing list, and maybe a web page or wiki we can
> provide some resources aimed at students based on what they needed - I
> found my contact with london.pm introduced to loads of stuff that
> would have really helped me at uni, and I suspect most computing
> students would find guides on practical programming using perl
> (amongst many other things) immensely helpful, and it would help fill
> the skills gap of graduates with useful skills rather than
> Java-by-whiteboard-and-mouse-click.
I think this is a great idea. I'm not sure how many university  
students here in Singapore are interested in or have even heard much  
about Perl - there's plenty of excitement in the Ruby, Linux and even  
some in the Python communities, and Perl programmers don't seem to get  
invited to those sort of parties. But if somebody was just looking for  
"a quick way to convert FASTA-formatted files into Malign-formatted  
files" and this new wiki had a neat, clean, ten-line script to do  
exactly that, we might get more students giving us a try.

> Anyway, in the south west of the UK we have 2 perl monger groups and 5
> universities, what we could do with is trying to establish a liason at
> each uni (in the computer club, comp sci department, bio-informatics,
> wherever) and a couple of people in local mongers who will try and to
> look at what students are doing, coordinate talks, socials and trips
> to workshops.
I'd love to hear how this goes. Singapore.pm is still way too small to  
take on these sorts of projects, but there are two major universities  
within easy reach; once we've grown a bit, I'll want to try this out  
here.

> A joined up effort could make it easier, we could share information
> about what uni's are using perl and how, and also ideas about what we
> could have done with at uni, (If I had Perl Testing Handbook, Perl
> Hacks, and the Perl Cookbook in my first year at uni, I'd have kicked
> ass, ok, if I had them, and actually read them maybe) - a shared wiki,
> both for the mongers and students could help,
Agreed.

> and could also make it
> easier to hook up graduates or placement students interested in Perl
> with employers looking for trainees.
This would be particularly awesome: my current company is a really  
small startup, and we use internships to help with all our  
development. It would be fantastic to have a way to find college  
students already interested in Perl - and for them to find us.

One last question though:
> Could really do with a perl.org mailing list to coordinate it - maybe
> a global students.pm ?

Why a @perl.org or @pm.org mailing list? Does this tie into your plan  
of doing this under the aegis of TPF? We could just as easily start  
this as a Google Group or whatever.

And, offtopic:
> I'm guessing some you noticed ovid summoned the meme-that-will-not-die
> once more on use.perl.
What an absolutely lovely sentence :-).

cheers,
Gaurav