Introduction as Student SAP Mentor

Former Member · ‎02-05-2015

Hi, I'm Ben. Thanks to the awesome people at the SAP Mentors & SAP University Alliances this year I get the privilege to join the Student SAP Mentor community.

Being a Student SAP Mentor involves two things:

Mentor & coach ambitious students & startups at diverse competitions & events (like the ESA App Camp or InnoJam at CeBIT) & help connect them to resources & communities (like SAP's Cloud Development Platform , MOOCs , UX Networks , Innovation Hubs, Startup Focus Programs, Developer Pros, Maker Spaces, Startup Events) that can empower them to reach their goals.
Adding value to a larger project that benefits the SAP community & ecosystem

That's the Student SAP Mentor context in which I am writing this intro.

Here is who I am and what I think about:

Life, work, study, & volunteering through 10 countries has taught me to treasure the fascinating stories that people carry. There are deliciously diverse worlds of truth in peoples minds and hearts. The German author Herman Hesse put it this way, “He who travels far will often see things far removed from what he believed was Truth." - Herman Hesse, The Journey To The East: A Novel"

This unsettling claim has won me over as I've gone through my studies: Bsc. in Global Business Informatics at the IT University of Copenhagen . This program is teaching me a marketable mind-and-skill set for mapping peoples' needs to resources. I've found this often involves a kind of "travelling far" by observing & asking why people do what they do.

What I can't get enough of:

Information Design & Storytelling:
- I'm moved by the skill & practice of Requirements engineering, or, in my words, Jedi skill of charming the right questions & answers out of a situation for product design. This seems to inevitably involve hearing peoples' stories & repackaging them.
Exploring Tech Trends:
- Currently exploring
  - Crowdfunding on Indiegogo: Finding out what it takes to run a crowdfunding campaign for the first time with my better half
  - 3dPrinting as a low cost community service
  - RaspberryPi for journaling as a headless Human-Computer Interface
Making things:
- This means building apps or prototypes with my startup team
Circus Arts:
- I'm an avid unicyclist, I love to juggle, and take any chance I can practice aerial silks & wire-walking.
MOOC Learning:
- My Last 12 months could be painted in my participation in MOOC learning environments
- Jan : Intro to SAP HANA Cloud Platform @openSAP
- Feb : Objective-C @treehouse
- March : Vishal's Intro to HANA @openSAP
- April : Business Suite on HANA @openSAP
- May : javascript @treehouse
- June : Ruby @treehouse
- July : Machine Learning @StanfordOnline
- Aug : Data Scientists Toolkit @Coursera
- Sept : R Programming @Coursera
- Nov: Sketchup for 3D Printing @youtube
- Right now: I'm taking the Updated Intro to SAP HANA Cloud Platform (emphasis on Raspberry PI + HCP)

What I think about:

Left alone -- I tend to muse on mechanics of knowledge:

Specifically, I think often of how hearts, minds, & society interact as knowledge receptacles & dispensers.

Heart: What I know in my heart plays by different rules than what I know in my mind.
Mind: My mind holds a different tier of knowledge and it knows how to translate that into common language (on a good day).
Community: A Community like the world holds complete sets of knowledge on how to do fancy things like microsurgery, make nano-robots, & build toasters from scratch, but this is usually shared across multiple people throughout diverse organizations.
Learning:
- Though they handle knowledge differently, a heart, mind, and community each have the ability to learn & chances to teach each other.
- This is especially interesting given the unprecedented connect-ability opportunities that this year's mega-trends are throttling us with.
- These thoughts usually result in application ideas that fall in this scope: How to blend empowering knowledge between people.
  - For example, "Moot" a Social Notes App

What I value:

My character mission statement defines the three things I want on my tombstone: Worker, Learner, Friend.

What I'm inspired by:

Stories that can delight, lift, instruct, or encourage.

I care about making it easier to connect people to self-empowering opportunities - like education access. I mean the kind of education that nearly 2 billion smartphone users have available to them through the new wave of quality MOOC education & "if you can google it you can build it" realities that are happening in many but not all parts of the world.

Knowledge communities like Quora --- Quora charms useful & interesting stories out of fascinating knowledge sources (people!) & serves it up to anyone within arms reach of the internet.