Microsoft's Dream Spark Yatra

Here it is, the much awaited Microsoft’s Dream Spark Yatra in Chennai, after covering its sessions in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, and Coimbatore. The Dream Spark Yatra (DSY) is an initiative by Microsoft to conduct 100 events, in 100 days, across 100 cities! The DSY is easily one of the largest student conferences with a lot of participation from budding engineers. The one day mega-event aims at imparting the student community with lots of learning providing them with oodles of updates on latest technologies broadening their technical horizons. This event also brings with it the brightest of students and professionals in front of us – to discuss technology, career in IT related fields, and to hint us on real-world skill as well.

This time The Dream Spark Yatra was in Chennai on 4^th March at SRM University with its Student Partners for the event. The event is said to have been a huge hit amongst the student community registering about 3200 students compared to the 1600 registrations it received last year. The Chennai .Net User Group (CNUG) Student Chapter which is a community for the Microsoft Student Partners here in Chennai stole the show with their outstanding way of coordinating and organizing the event. They had hired Mr Udhay, a thorough professional to compere the event and he definitely had the audience in splits almost every time he came out to speak – very entertaining and engaging!

The event unfolded with three technical sessions, a fun and a quiz session. Mr. Floris van Heijst, GM (Business and Marketing Organisation) was the first guest to hit the dais with the keynote address. His speech had a main focus on “Microsoft for Students” and the students reciprocated so very well and had a good time interacting with him, throwing and fielding questions. Mr Floris went ahead promoting Microsoft’s Project Shiksha, which aims to accelerate computer literacy among teachers and students. He also explained to the students about the need and objective of the Dream Spark program.

Next on stage from Microsoft was Mr.Sandeep Alur who was there for a technical session. His session was called “Unleash a more beautiful web with IE 9”. He went on to tell us about the features and advantages of the Internet Explorer 9 and it yet again was interesting and absorbing as of course we all knew With IE 9, Microsoft got to show off some of its best work to an audience that is increasingly indifferent and hard to please!

Following a break, Mr Arvind Ganesan took over emphasising the need to make software development easy and said The LightSwitch could be of a great help for those not-so-great programmers out there! Even those students who weren’t technologically inclined took a special liking towards the session as they heard and saw what the LightSwitch could do!

The Microsoft Xbox Kinect session with Shweta Satish was a real entertainer and was the most interesting part of the event. Almost a crowd of about 2000 students were waiting to get their hands on the Xbox. When you have no controller with Kinect and when Kinect responds to how you move, it for sure is bound to be a hit! It was an awesome Kinect experience to select people from audience.

The quiz session also went on very well with good amount of students attracting a huge participation from the students. Hemant Kumar Goyal from MNM Jain Engineering College grabbed a first place winning 1 TB External Seagate Hard Disk Drive while Kushal Bandari from Rajalakshmi Institute of Technology came second and walked back home with a Sennheiser eh150 headphone.

The students seemed to be thrilled about the whole experience. They offered a few suggestions and pointed out that the event this time topped last year’s. One of them was literally taken aback when I said this event was completely organized by the Microsoft Student Partners in Chennai with no professional support.

Shweta Satish, Secretary CNUGStudent was all smiles and said the stress, anxiety and hard work put in by every CNUGStudent paid off and it was once in a lifetime experience for her. She was also very happy about the overwhelming response they received from the audience and especially when people had turned up from far off places just for the event, it speaks volumes about the success of the event!

The Chennai .Net User Group students (CNUGStudent) were completely happy for the good show they put on attracting students from over 120 colleges. Its Public Relations Secretary and CNUGStudent, G Sreenivaasan said he was on cloud nine after the success of the event. He thanked his fellow CNUGStudents for their effort into the Dream Spark Yatra and said they as a team are very happy and ecstatic to pull off such a big event! Well done CNUGs, and Cheers to Microsoft!!