Google Cloud Career Readiness Student Mentor initiative — Mentor Experience

7 min readNov 29, 2021

In this article, I’ll share all about Google Cloud Career Readiness Student Mentor Initiative and my journey as a Student Mentor.

We’re going to see

What is Google Cloud Career Readiness Student Mentor initiative?
Selection Process, Rewards, Roles & Responsibilities of a Student Mentor
My experience of being a Student Mentor & a Googler’s Mentee

In the current era, Cloud technology is one of the essential skill & everyone is trying to empower their employees so that they can step out of their comfort zone and take on new job opportunities.

Google cloud is one of the leading public cloud providers & as we know, with more power comes more responsibility. Google Cloud started Google Cloud Career Readiness Program to empower students in emerging technologies with the vision of making students Cloud Ready.

Google Cloud Career Readiness Student Mentor Initiative

Google Cloud Career Readiness program enables students of all backgrounds the ability to prepare for cloud careers through industry-recognized training (Hands-on), skill badges, and Global Certification. Also, they can build deep expertise in business and technical domains related to cloud infrastructure, application development, big data, and machine learning at zero cost. There are thousands of students every year taking benefit from this program to become Google Cloud Ready, but it is not the same for all the participants in this program & they need help so that they can also become cloud-ready. Google Cloud again takes responsibility to help these students to achieve their goals & introduce a new initiative, Google Cloud Career Readiness Student Mentor initiative.

Who are Career Readiness Student Mentors?

They are young technophiles and leaders passionate to learn new technologies. These students learn advanced concepts around cloud computing making them ready to crack industry-recognized Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Certification and are enthusiastic to share their learnings with fellow colleagues. Career Readiness Mentor acts as the primary conduit between students enrolled, faculty, and Google team.

Selection Process

Excited to know about the selection process ?? Before getting started with the selection process, let’s have a glimpse of the criteria first.

Criteria to become CR Student Mentor

Complete your Coursera Course Specialisation (5 courses) https://www.coursera.org/specializations/gcp-architecture.
Complete 3 skill badges (mentioned below) within 10 days will be eligible to apply.

The above-mentioned pointers were the criteria for all the invited folks via Personal Email Invitation & You will be amazed that were more than 1000 folks who applied for it but only 48 got selected! So how do they choose the Top 48, Curious?

They haven’t revealed that how they choose us as a student mentor but a few things I’ve seen in all my co-mentors are

They all are very proficient in their specific domain, enthusiastic about learning & experimenting new things and the last & the most important thing, they all have a common nature of sharing their learnings & experiences, I think this was the key factor for selecting us as Student Mentor.

Roles & Responsibility

Teaching or mentoring, spreading your knowledge & learning is the best we can do for the community as a student & this program is more focused on this prospect. So, we had roles & responsibilities that would perfectly reflect the vision.

Evangelize and mentor students on Coursera ACE Specialisation, Google Cloud & Google Cloud Skills Boost (formerly Qwiklabs) for hands-on lab experience.
Organize student online sessions/create groups to address their queries
Encourage the students who are part of the program to gain knowledge as much as possible from the Course and help them to build interest to learn more by solving other Quests and Skill Badges too.
Encourage & help those students who are preparing for ACE examination under this program, solve their queries, understand issues, etc.
Be the point of contact for students for queries related to the Career Readiness Program

Rewards

A certificate of appreciation from Google to you.
Google Cloud branded goodies.
Chance for Career mentorship by Googler (top performers) for 3 months

This is all about this program, Now let me share my experience with you all.

My experience of being a Student Mentor

I always believed, if someone feels confident enough to explain it to someone else, they might develop a higher self-efficiency and that’s the best way to learn, it will help others as well as yourself to strengthen your learnings & find your odds very easily. This has always helped me throughout my Cloud Journey from start and this program was the best fit for it.

I’m lucky enough to have been on both sides of the mentoring process. One of the advantages of being a mentor is the influx of fresh propositions from your mentee. There is no one better stocked to offer an undried take on the course basics than your mentee.
Being a student mentor of more than 25 folks, who were eager to start their Cloud Journey, I helped them to learn new technologies with Google Cloud Platform and complete their ACE Certification successfully, also counsel them in their Cloud Journey.
My mentees aren’t the only folks who gained knowledge, I also learned many valuable lessons from their entire experience. When I heard the student’s concerns, I was able to tailor my delivery one step ahead of module content to directly answer their questions.
Additionally, I could also ingrain that knowledge, experience and inspire all the students around the realm under my mentorship to do better in their Cloud journey.
This program also gave me an opportunity to interact with 47 other scrupulous mentors who took an interest in learning and gained insights through their cognitive experience in their journey.

The quote that very much resonates with my professional goal is “Teaching is the best way to learn and grow”, and I would continue to do that, to help other individuals so that they can grow and learn from my mistakes and my experiences.

My experience of being a Googler’s Mentee

Everyone faces challenges at work and in real life, but one who makes these challenges easy is a Mentor, and being a mentee of a Googler was indeed a dream come true opportunity!

Being one of the top 4 performers in Google Cloud Career Readiness Student Mentor Initiative, I had chosen application development using Google Cloud Platform as my preferred choice, where I was going to be mentored by a googler for 3 months. As per my preferred domain, I got assigned Romin Irani, who is Cloud Advocate at Google India as my mentor. Being a Cloud Engineering Analyst in a Google Cloud Premier Partner Company, I got to explore so many technologies & offerings by Google Cloud but I never explored any application internally in depth using these services, how they function together to work as a whole product to make someone’s life easier. But collaborating with my mentor on a live project on Google Cloud Platform made it a lot easier and comprehensible. We initiated the process of the live project by building basic blocks, sharing our thoughts, making the process interactive and vivacious.
Followed by that, I was introduced to proper plans to be executed in the upcoming 3 months of the project. During that phase, I acquired abundant technical as well as non-technical skills. Prior to that, I never coded more than 150 lines of code but during this program, I created my own application from very scratch. In this journey, besides learning from a developer approach, I got to learn as an architect, a project manager & from SRE prospects as well. I got to explore every aspect of the development, deployment & operations process.

My favourite thing about the program was, how grounded & helpful my mentor was. It wasn’t really that awkward to talk to him at all, and he made me feel really at ease. That is the reason I wanted to share my experience with you all!!
I always believed that teaching others is a great way of learning but my mentor also taught me the art of sharing. I came to know that being a mentor of someone is not only just having concerns with upskilling someone’s technical skills, As my mentor always encouraged and guided me in my all ups and downs. This is a life-changing opportunity that I got & I will cherish it forever. I got to learn a lot from my mentor, my associates and would like to continue the same throughout my career. Looking back to those 3 months I can see I have grown a lot professionally and individually as well.

After three months of Mentorship by Googlers program came to its most exciting point, where we got a chance to showcase our learnings through our projects to the panel of Google Cloud superiors & Higher Education Team. You can imagine what experience I had. All feedback & appreciation from them about my project was remarkable & I really would like to thank Isha Porwal & Google Cloud Higher Education Team for their continued support, guidance and for such a momentous opportunity !!

In the long run, one quote that I would never forget is to “Never stop learning and exploring new things” which works in every part of my life.

I hope this blog helped you & Would be eager to listen to your experiences as well.

If you have any concerns or want to learn more about GCP then please have a look at my previous blogs, Also feel free to contact me via LinkedIn.

Thank You