[CLOSED] University Ambassador Program

Updates Announcements
#1

Hey,

Are you a Roblox developer in college that loves sharing your knowledge on development? Do you ever imagine what it would be like if your university was introduced to Roblox? Roblox classes? Roblox club? If you answered yes to any of the questions, then the University Ambassador Program is for you!

The University Ambassador Program (UAP) is an initiative dedicated to introducing Roblox to college campuses. As an ambassador, you will volunteer to bridge Roblox development to your university. Our program will provide resources, support on initiatives, and a Guilded hub for your fellow students to connect in.

The Possibilities Are Endless

:joystick: Game Jam

Want to compete with fellow students? You can host your own game jam for your campus (or versus another campus in our program!). Oh, and did we mention… prizes?

:thought_balloon: Workshops or Presentations

Are you passionate about a specific topic on Roblox? Hosting workshops or presentations on your campus is a great way to express your ideas.

:handshake: Campus Networking Events

Roblox is the beginning of the metaverse and tons of people want a chance to meet others who have the same passion! Mixers and networking events for people who could be interested in Roblox development are great opportunities to meet people.

:woman_teacher: Creating a Course

You can collaborate with a professor to create a course or unit revolving around Roblox development and how to grow on the platform!

:school: Roblox Club

A campus hub where fellow Roblox developers can meet and collaborate! You can help introduce people to development or even come together as a group to make your own studio.

:speech_balloon: Panel Discussion

Maybe your campus is really interested in growing in the development industry but doesn’t know where to start. You can host a panel at your campus with some of our team as well as other developers to help your campus get questions answered!

Our Team is Here
Just know you’re not alone! Our team is here to help grow and sustain your campus chapter by:

  • Connecting you to other chapters and developers

  • Providing resources and education on Roblox

  • Providing a handbook that will serve as your guide throughout the program

  • Incentivizing your chapter as it grows

  • Providing support for events hosted on campus

  • Guilded university chapter creation under our official channels

  • Inviting you to monthly check-ins to address questions or initiatives for your chapter

  • And more!

Why should you become a University Ambassador?

  • Awesome way to promote your development skills

  • Introduce Roblox to your local community and teach them what you know best

  • Gain leadership experience for future job opportunities

  • Your chapter will be under your leadership and guidance, so you can spread fresh knowledge to a community that is eager to learn from you

  • Build relationships with your professors and department heads that are beneficial for connectivity and references

  • Work with other developers/ambassadors and get the opportunity to collaborate with them

Roblox is all about what you make of it, and your chapter should be something that you also have fun with.

FAQ

Are there any requirements for this?

  • No, you must be enrolled in a university or education center above the high school level.

Which colleges can apply?

  • Any university, college, or community college in the U.S. is welcome to apply!

Can university students outside the U.S. apply?

As of right now, no. We have plans to launch internationally eventually.

Who should apply?

  • An ideal ambassador candidate is someone who is passionate about Roblox development and can engage with their campus community using leadership and organization skills to build a home for Roblox on their campus.

What is the application process like?

  • First, you’ll need to submit an application here.

  • If your application is what we are looking for, we’ll contact you via DevForum or email to notify you of your acceptance.

  • Once accepted, you will go through an onboarding process and begin your chapter creation with our help!

If you have any questions or concerns about this program, please feel free to contact the staff via email at devrel-uni@roblox.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

October 26th Update

Applications are now closed!

Thank you for your interest in the University Ambassador Program at this time. We’re now going to dedicate time to review applications. We will reach out to accepted applicants for an update via DevForum and email.

Also, be on the look out as we do plan on relaunching apps within the near future!

Thanks!

163 Likes
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#4

This program seems like a great opportunity! But this here has a writing error. Best of luck to everyone.

11 Likes
#6

Seems like an awesome program! But if roblox sent ambassadors merch like this, I’d actually go back to university just to get in :eyes:

jacket
jacket600Ă—515 251 KB

22 Likes
#8

Why is it always Gilded? Why not also support Discord?
However overall this looks really cool and I might sign up to become an Ambassador at some point.

10 Likes
#9

What’re the chances there will be merch? Getting people to show up to other club meetings is hard as is. What would incentivize people to show up for a Roblox club? :face_exhaling:

for lots of merch, i would gladly improve the MIT to Roblox pipeline for software engineers

10 Likes
#10

Because Roblox owns Guilded and I guess they want to advertise Guilded like that

21 Likes
#11

Such a good opportunity !!! Goodluck to everyone!

8 Likes
#12

Wait they OWN Guilded? I knew they use it for basically all community based things like this but I thought they just liked it a lot or something.

6 Likes
#13

Yeah, if you google “who owns Guilded” then it says that it is owned by Roblox

7 Likes
#15

In other words, you want free advertising in order to isolate more recruits for potential employment. Unless there’s some sort of incentive, echo’d in most legitimate feedback already posted, there’s no point. And there’s no real reason or application to bridge school work to Roblox. So, it would be incredibly hard to find students that want to do this and to tell them there’s value when, let’s be real here, there isn’t.

People spend money to go to college to find value. Having Roblox listed on your resume or even extracurriculars does absolutely nothing unless the hiring company is on Roblox or knows what Roblox is outside of a “children’s game”.

–

My thought process as a College Student (aka Target Audience of Program)

I am technically considered part of this program’s target audience. I can tell you for certain that no college / university student will be willing to do this. There’s just not enough value. This program aims to do something decent and that’s by showing students development. That’s not intrinsically bad. This program basically does a few things that are not very value worthy to a future ambassador:

  • Creates brand awareness for free
  • Creates new possible revenue sources from adults for free
  • Creates new users towards Guilded (owned by Roblox) for free
  • Creates a new pipeline for candidates that Roblox can hire for free

Every single impression that we make on a college campus can go three ways:

  1. Start developing / playing Roblox (Helps Roblox more than it helps an ambassador who did all the work)
  2. Start looking at Roblox for a job and applies (Helps Roblox more than it helps an ambassador)|
  3. Thinks this is stupid and walks away (No one wins)

For someone in college / university, we have a ton of classes that has a higher chance for landing a job. Unfortunately, no fault to anyone, this doesn’t. This is purely volunteer work. This is a lot for a volunteer to do, essentially free brand ambassadors, for no benefit. No one in their right mind would do that. Not a college / university student who’s full time and / or paying for college. We have loans to pay for. We don’t have time to advertise a multi-billion dollar corporation for free.

High-level what it would take to operate something like this in the exact way listed here:

  • Time commitment (4-5+ hours a week given that University Ambassadors would lead it)
  • You’d have to register this club to operate on campus (takes a ton of time)
  • You’d have to organize events (takes a ton of time)
  • You’d have to figure out how to advertise to college students who think Roblox is a children’s game (y’all clearly haven’t figured that out so, expecting college students to do it for free is unrealistic)
  • You’d have to find time to attend check-ins (which takes time out of studying for classes)
  • You’d have to give up a sizeable portion of the time you’re not studying and panicking about classes
  • You’d have to figure out how to make a team out of this because, doing this on your own is overly time consuming and the fear of failing out of college has been instilled in you since you were little
  • All the above with the notion that having Roblox club on your resume does absolutely nothing for you in terms of getting a job or degree

That’s not even the tip of the iceberg or all the problems (drama, etc) that would possibly come out of this. Sure, you say support is provided. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t mean much. This is way too big for volunteer work.

No sane professor, let alone a department head, is going to think that minecraft-lego people in a virtual reality platform aimed to target kid’s spending habits as a viable way to essentially waste part of a college tuition.

People don’t go to college to make games on Roblox. They go to college to make games on Unity or EU4/5. Or they have the goals of going into Rockstar, EA, etc. Or making an actual income. There’s very little distinction that you can make outside of being a “game platform”. It’s great that Roblox handles stuff for you but, it’s also takes away a lot of the learning opportunities that you’d learn in school. Unfortunately, those learning opportunities translate to the real world whereas Roblox doesn’t. For example, you can’t create your own networking because Roblox handles it for you. You can’t come up with a custom database because Roblox handles it for you. You can’t even test or write shaders because, yet again, Roblox handles it for you. There’s a bunch of stuff that Roblox handles automatically that would distract or negate the purpose of going to college. The stuff that would be beneficial like working on team of people, leading that team, etc takes too much time and the return value basically doesn’t exist. It’s really, really hard to convince those who have something to lose anything but, that fact. It’s harder when there’s no value for the person attempting to do that for you.

I think that your target audience here is wrong. This should’ve been tested with highschool students before testing your luck with college students. Highschool students have far less to lose and that’s where most are still trying to find a passion. Plus, it’s easier to convince some highschool student that “Roblox will change your life” than in college where a possible parent refers this platform as a “bottomless money pit for my kids”.

Personally, I can see traction of this being semi-decent because there’s no baseline to base this experience off of but, this is volunteer work and I’d expect that most people, without clear motivation, will drop this initiative and end up wasting a lot of time.

Bottom line; it’s ridiculous that you’re exploiting the college minority on this platform and coaxing them into free low-risk low-cost advertising tools for a corporate entity while slapping the “oh yeah there’s value” punchline when there isn’t. I don’t want to offend the person or people who came up with this because I can imagine this took a lot of planning. This is just not a good idea. I think there are better ways this company should look into instead of banking on a bunch of college kids hoping that it goes ok. This seems severely out of touch with the tough reality that college / university students face.

Plus as a university person myself, I really don’t want to get bullied at a college / university level from parents, professors and other students thinking I am coaxing naive developers to a dead end. Point of college is to have a higher chance to break out of that dead end. Not move closer to it. It doesn’t help that any noticeable game that I could show to someone is low-effort child-friendly looking blobs of colors and money-grabs. My target audience are used to EU4/5, Unity, etc. I think if they saw Roblox, they’d think it’s a joke. No professor with years of experience would buy into any of this. Almost every person I’ve talked to thinks that Roblox is an endless money pit for kids, a disgrace to the game-development industry and a total waste of time. They’re kinda right. I have no issues existing on this platform and doing slow development but, seeking a career or being taught it while being in debt seems like an abysmal feat. I don’t think a endeavor this big would lead me closer to not being in debt so, as Barbara from Shark Tank always says, I’m out.

Also, y’all copied this: Developer community programs | Students  |  Google Developer Student Clubs  |  Google Developers

53 Likes
#16

I mean, it’s alright I guess…? I got no words.

2 Likes
#17

Don’t expect an upvote from me, I do not see new stuff other than talking to other students.

6 Likes
#18

would love to do this if my whole school didnt hate roblox

9 Likes
#19

This sounds awesome! Is this program restricted to institutions within the United States or is it available in other countries as well?

4 Likes
#21

I have always wondered when Roblox would try to initiate something similar to this program; personally, I learnt most programming concepts from creating things in Roblox but imo I would extend this program below high school level or in high school level as most people already have learnt core programming concepts above university or college (assuming that most people would want to learn Roblox Studio for computer-science related studies)

8 Likes
#22

Which colleges can apply?

  • Any university, college, or community college in the U.S. is welcome to apply!

Can university students outside the U.S. apply?

As of right now, no. We have plans to launch internationally eventually.

Seems like Roblox is planning on launching it internationally, I think it’ll take quite a time though.

6 Likes
#23

I agree, it really doesn’t sound like something university-level. There are plenty of other much more professional programming and modeling courses. Why would students choose Roblox over those?

In future job applications, seeing “studied Roblox development”, would employers think seriously of that?

An amazing opportunity for ambassadors for sure, but I can’t really imagine this taking off…


I might've misunderstood, could anyone explain to me what "introducing Roblox to colleges" really mean?
4 Likes
#24

Such a great opportunity!! I’m honored to be a part of this growing program :smile:

12 Likes
#25

They probably want to attract people who study computer science or IT. They need more games that earn them more money. :money_mouth_face:

2 Likes