Sun rolls out Campus Ambassador Program in major universities across Middle East

As a part of Sun's Academic Developer Program which offers a robust portfolio of free academic developer resources to students, faculty and researchers around the world, the Campus Ambassador Program has, to date, attracted more than 500 ambassadors from over 30 countries to work as interns building Sun communities at their respective school or university campus.

Dr. Tarek Ayass, Regional Manager, Education/Research and Healthcare Sectors, Sun Microsystems, MENA, explained:

"Sun Microsystems was founded by student developers, and we know that some of the best application development comes from students."

"The program aims to create the world's largest community of open-source student developers by working with the Presidents, Vice presidents, and the Deans of IT Schools to identify students who are a good fit for the Campus Ambassador position and giving these students the rare opportunity to learn about Java, Solaris, and other Sun open-source technologies directly from the source," he added.

In order to maximize the benefits of its higher education program, Sun provides extensive training to the graduate level students selected to fill the positions on all of the latest Sun technologies including Sun open-source, OpenSolaris, Java, MySQL, NetBeans, and Sun Studio. Campus Ambassadors then share this knowledge with fellow students by working with existing clubs or developing new communities of student open source developers, demonstrating Sun technology to fellow students, and promoting Sun events and contests on campus. They even use blogging as a tool to spread the word and connect with fellow ambassadors globally who are linked together by a state-of-the-art community website that offers further training materials and top-notch support from an international technical team.

"Sun is committed to helping students in the region to get started on the right foot and the Campus Ambassador Program offers senior students valuable work experience and the chance for high-level networking with one of the world's leading IT companies giving them a massive advantage as they prepare to enter the workforce," added Dr. Ayass. "In its first phase Sun will be launching the initiative in the UAE, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and it will be soon rolling out to other countries in the region."