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WATERLOO — The biggest and busiest Google Developer Student Club in North America is in session.
Oleksandr Levinskyi, a fourth-year computer science student at Conestoga College, is at the front of a classroom between a large cardboard box of Google hoodies and his laptop.
“We have lots of Google swag,” said Levinskyi, a mentor with the club and past president.
About 23 college students are sitting in the classroom with their laptops open, and they are all watching Levinskyi. He and the other leaders of the developer club are using a popular software platform called LeetCode that helps coders prepare for interviews.
Levinskyi asks everyone to split into teams of three.
“Let’s start with this problem. It is an easy one, relatively speaking,” he said. “We will review it together and then you will have 10 minutes to solve it.”
It is all about data structures and writing algorithms to describe them. It is commonly used by employers to assess coding skills and critical thinking.
Gavin Abeele, a third-year computer science student and club president, moves around the room, helping individuals and groups.
“This is about community, and helping students learn material that is not part always part of the curriculum,” said Abeele in an interview.
The group at Conestoga College has more than 750 members, and last year was the biggest and busiest among the 143 clubs across North America, says Google. The company started the program in 2017 as a pilot in India to help students learn about Google products and technologies and better prepare for work in the industry.
Following the successful pilot in India, it expanded into more than 100 countries and has more than 1,900 chapters. The Conestoga chapter organizes a couple of meetings every month where students learn about products and platforms with hands-on workshops.
Abeele, Levinskyi and others have access to the globe-girdling network of student leaders, professional community organizes, industry experts and invitations to select Google events through the developer clubs.
The Conestoga group organized 82 local and online events that attracted 4,560 students last year. They covered a diverse range of topics, including software, web, hardware, machine learning/AI, hackathons, job search panels and tech interview preparations.
Most recently they gathered on March 2, in the middle of Reading Week. Even then, about two dozen students turned out, which is far fewer than most of the meetups. They gathered in a fourth-floor classroom at Conestoga. Some are enrolled in business, others in marketing, but the overwhelming majority are computer science students.
Levinskyi is not surprised students would come out even when the college is on a weeklong break. Blame it on LeetCode.
“It is a very popular platform for interview preparation whenever you are being interviewed for a developer position,” said Levinskyi.
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