Tech Companies Expand ‘Student Ambassador’ Programs

Technology companies have recently expanded their use of student ambassadors—computer-science or marketing majors who help spread the word about new software on campuses in exchange for small stipends or just free T-shirts.

Companies of all types have long sought to win the hearts and minds of college students, but technology companies seem increasingly willing to allow students behind the curtain on product development, in an age when the hottest tech services continue to bubble up from college campuses.

Google, for instance, plans to increase the number of “student ambassadors” on campuses from 126 last year to more than 150 this fall, said Miriam Schneider, a Google product-marketing manager. Next month the company will fly all of the student representatives to Google’s headquarters for a two-day summit, where they will see demonstrations of Google products so they can better hype them to their classmates.

Most of the student ambassadors have previously held summer internships at Google, though others apply to the program directly, through an increasingly competitive application process. Ms. Schneider would not say whether the students were paid, except to say “we do provide them with a lot of swag, and we make sure we keep the structure of the program within employment best practices.”

During the academic year, Google’s student ambassadors are expected to organize events on their campuses where they demonstrate how to fit Google products into their studying and socializing—and give out free T-shirts with the company’s colorful logo.

In some cases the students also help encourage grass-roots efforts to persuade their college administrations to adopt Google’s free Apps for Education as the official campus e-mail and communication platform. One of the Google student ambassadors at Emory University, for instance, helped conduct a survey of students about whether they were satisfied with the university’s current e-mail system (which is not provided by Google). The student representative, Emily Rubin, then showed the results to campus administrators, stressing that the survey indicated a hunger for new features like those offered by Google.

At one event that Ms. Rubin helped organize on Emory’s campus in February, she and several other students reserved a large lecture classroom and gave presentations about their favorite Google services to about 90 students. Free pizza was served, and she also gave out Google stickers, pens, and T-shirts.

“One of the great parts of the program is all of the swag,” she said. The program also helped land her a job. She now works full time at Google, helping to market Google Apps for Education.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has steadily expanded its “student-partner program,” which now includes 3,500 students in 126 countries. Most of the applicants to the program are computer-science majors, though some business-focused students participate as well, said Jon Perera, general manager for academic programs at Microsoft. He said the student partners were paid a small stipend, but he would not say how much.

Microsoft has run the program for more than nine years, and Mr. Perera said that it had grown beyond simply asking the students to organize demos of new products—though the student partners do that. Now, he said, the goal is to get the students “more hands-on with the code,” by giving them early access to new products, such as development kits to build apps for Microsoft’s smartphone platform.

“The swag and free pizza was the Version 1.0 model of student-partner program,” he said. “The Microsoft student partners around the world are some of the very first beta testers,” who help report bugs and suggest features.

Mr. Perera said that the student partners were not usually involved in persuading colleges to adopt Microsoft’s free e-mail service, Office365 for Education, though he said students have organized grass-roots campaigns for the service on some campuses. “Once a university has decided to go with Office365,” he said, the partners will “host workshops and say, Here’s how to get the most out of your LiveID.”

Some partners go on to get jobs at Microsoft, he said, but the company has also helped steer the students to positions at other companies that work with Microsoft. Some of that matchmaking takes place through a Microsoft program called Students to Business, a job marketplace with listings from some 700,000 partner companies, according to Mr. Perera.

“Our vision is that we want to inspire students around world to innovate and create what’s next,” he said. Naturally, they want those future tech leaders to be fans of Microsoft products.

One current Microsoft student partner, Thomas Ruschke, a sophomore at European University Munich, said he spent about 10 to 15 hours a week on the gig, mainly offering technical support to people who have heard he’s the go-to guy for Microsoft.

“It’s a regular occurrence that if someone has to do a PowerPoint presentation, they come to me and say, How do I make that look better?” he said.

This week, Microsoft flew Mr. Ruschke and 24 other student partners to New York City for the company’s Imagine Cup, a software-coding competition, and the student filed constant updates to Twitter and his personal blog. He said that he didn’t expect to get a job at Microsoft out of the program, but that the experience would look good on his résumé. “And you learn so much from working with people who know what they’re doing,” he said.

New student-focused Web services have also set up networks of student representatives, such as McGraw-Hill’s GradeGuru, which has more than 50 “campus ambassadors.”

Apple pioneered the use of student representatives to evangelize about its products decades ago, and that company continues its program, though an Apple spokesman refused to say how many students were involved, and all the student reps must sign nondisclosure agreements and are instructed not to talk to reporters.

One tech company that started on a college campus is noticeably absent from the student-rep trend. Facebook does not appear to run a student-ambassador program.