Getting My College on the GitHub Campus Map (2023)Archived

To get the GitHub Student Developer Pack you need to prove you are a student. The clean way to prove it is for your college to be a GitHub Campus Program partner school.

Shri Gnanambica Degree College, Madanapalli was not one. It had no reason to be.

The ask

The Campus Program is free. It costs a college nothing but the paperwork.

For a tier 3 college it is also completely invisible. Nobody there treated it as something worth doing, because nothing in the way the college was measured depended on it.

I checked the map to see who in the region already had it. In the whole of Rayalaseema I could find two:

• Mohan Babu University
• VIT

That was the argument. Not "I need this for my student pack", which is true but is my problem, not theirs. The argument was that the college would be listed next to those two.

The follow-up

Two or three days of it. Going back, explaining the same thing again. By then management knew me, largely because of the APSCHE trip a couple of months earlier, and that made the door easier to walk through.

Two days after applying, approved.

Then my own pack got rejected. Seven times.

Partner status solves the college side. It does not automatically solve yours.

The verification wants a student email on the college domain. My college does not issue mail. There is no domain. So every route I had was a document upload, and each one came back rejected:

• Parent application. Rejected.
• College ID card. Rejected.
• The ID card again, more photos, better lighting. Rejected.
• A sealed and stamped letter, which I got the principal to sign. Rejected.

Seven rejections, for a student who was demonstrably a student at a partner school.

The eighth attempt was the college ID card again. Same document that had already failed more than once. This time it went through.

I never found out what was different.

I made a new account for this rather than using my old one, and picked the name deliberately: loyality_7.

What it was actually for

Once I had it, the point was not to have it.

I went around telling juniors and classmates what was in that pack. People were paying real money for courses and tools while a few thousand rupees of equivalent was sitting there free, gated behind a form nobody had told them about.

Then came the part I did not plan at all.

The college was preparing for its NAAC review, going for an A+ grade. The reviewers who came to campus were impressed by the GitHub partnership. It was exactly the kind of thing they were looking for and had not expected to find here, and it came up well in their feedback.

Looking back

Nobody at the college asked for this and nobody would have noticed if I had dropped it. Two colleges in the whole region were on that map, and now there is a third, in Madanapalli, because a student kept coming back to the same office about a free form.

The pack was what I wanted. The map is what stayed.