Forcelandia is right around the corner and we are really excited. Over the weeks leading up to Forcelandia V, we’ll be publishing more info on what makes this year special!
Being our 5th year, we are taking that Roman numeral V very seriously with a focus on volunteering / giving back / otherwise helping out our Ohana. As a community event, this is a topic near and dear to our hearts! In addition to sessions hand-picked to help developers learn other ways to use our unique skill-sets, we are always looking at how to grow developers. To this end, Forcelandia is pleased to announce a student scholarship, in coordination with the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY) in Merida, Mexico, and Rafael Hernandez. The scholarship is available to graduates of a Salesforce Class that Rafael has now delivered twice this past academic year, in coordination with Dr. Edgar Cambranes Martínez, who leads the Software Engineering Degree Program at UADY.
Forcelandia co-founders Angela Mahoney and Larry Latimer have been helping mentor the program that Rafael started in 2018 as part of his way to give back to the community. This has included two trips to Merida to participate in the end-of-semester project delivery presentations, which the student groups give in English to a panel of academic and technical professionals. These students review their approaches, their solutions, then field questions, and are graded on all of these aspects. Both times, Larry and Angela have come away very impressed with how much these capable students learn in very little time! In fact, in the last class, they did actual project work under Rafael’s guidance, for a non-profit organization in Minnesota.
Rafael has put together a rigorous program, and during our last trip, we all spoke of ways to support further opportunities for these students and open more doors to the Mexican branch of our Ohana.
We had three incredible applicants, and have selected Juan Carlos Moguel Solis. A member of the UADY Salesforce Student Group, we appreciate his curiosity to learn more about the platform so he can bring it back to his area and share. Specifically, we loved hearing how he is teaching his mother Salesforce, but hitting limits on the translated material and therefore wants to tackle ways to introduce more opportunities in his area for Spanish speakers, in addition to meeting and networking with experts on the platform.
If you see Juan, please introduce yourself and make him feel welcome.
