Becoming a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) in April 2017 has opened many doors for me.
What started as a spontaneous action ended in such an awesome experience. Sitting in a bar while having our MSP-Get2gether, my Senior Student Partner mentioned, that some French students contacted Microsoft. They seemed to need help building some kind of chatbot for a competition. That’s all I knew at this time but on the spur of the moment, I decided to support them and told Microsoft, that they may contact me. One day after I got a mail from two business students, telling me about their vision of a chatbot for urban gardening. Shortly after we met and discussed the details: They registered to the Agorize AI Challenge but unfortunately(/luckily) couldn’t develop a prototype for their pitch on their own. Since I developed Captain Calendar for my seminar work just months before, I was convinced to make something showable for them. The only problem was, that we only had 5 days left before the final pitch.
Together – working day and night – we created the chatbot MakeUsGrow. It’s a virtual assistant that guides and supports you to plant your own goods at home. In a nutshell, we wanted to revolutionize the urban gardening and help people to live more sustainably.
Turns out that the jury, which consisted of people from Volkswagen, Telekom, onepoint, and Agorize liked our idea. In fact, they liked it so much, that we won the first price! Competing against 695 other students from over 300 schools all over the world this was a really empowering and celebratory experience!
Thank you Sophie and Jasmin, it was great! Thank you Paris for being such a wonderful city and thank you Microsoft for sponsoring my stay there. And for the blog post 🙂