[BristolBathPM] reaching out to local students

[Lyle]

Aaron Trevena wrote:
> Hello,
>
> When I was working with Avbrief as a contractor they managed to
> recruit a couple of students/graduates from UWE and they picked up
> perl pretty quickly (hello rob!) and have since become pretty damn
> good.
>   

Funnily enough, on the way back from LPW I was talking to Peter about 
the UWE contacts I made when first relaunching this list. I was 
disappointed that this was never taken any further at the time, but 
looking back it was probably a bit to soon to be looking at things like 
this, when the list had only just got going again and we hadn't even had 
our first meet.
  I spoke about taking the free Perl course I've ran to the Uni, much 
the way that David Cross ran the CGI course at LPW. I think we are now 
in a good position to do this. This list has gone from strength to 
strength, meets are getting bigger, Nige is good enough to organize all 
the bath stuff, Peter sorted out the last meet, we've done some mini 
tech talks to each other and I've just come back from NYC to a load of 
posts to catch up with. All this puts a big smile on my face :)
  If we could put together some presentations about the group and some 
of the new things in Perl to pitch to the Uni staff. Then follow up with 
free Perl courses at the Uni for the student we'd have a winning mix.
  I was lucky enough to talk to Tim Bunce in the evening of the LPW, I 
asked him about his presentation skills which I was very impressed with, 
he recommended toastmasters which I have every intention of going to to, 
to improve my own skills at this. After all, rather than trying to hound 
other people to do talks at the Uni (like I did originally) I really 
should lead by example...
  Beyond the Uni's I know that there are a lot of very capable 
programmers that didn't go to Uni. When I was at secondary school there 
were plenty of us that would have loved to have the chance to learn some 
programming. All schools have a computer dept these days, so I think 
this should be another avenue we look down.

Anyone who is looking at brushing up on their presentation skills are 
more than welcome to come to toastmasters with me.
I think Alex and Mark are in a really good line to help inspire 
students, movies and football are both very popular areas.


Lyle