To all of our Estonian readers, this post was originally published in Estonian a few weeks ago.

At the last weekend of March, all of the Microsoft Student Partners from three Baltic countries met in Sigulda, Latvia. It was already second similar event, because last year we got together in a small place called Eisma located in Eastern Estonia. I decided to write a short article describing the event, because I think that this type of meetings are one of the coolest parts of being an MSP. In addition, it would be nice to know if something similar takes place in other countries. So all of the MSPs reading this post please share your experience in the comments.

First day

The whole event lasted for two days. As the initial meeting place was the office of Microsoft Latvia in Riga, large part of the first day consisted of driving. (About 5 hours in total for Estonians). After finally arriving there in the afternoon we first spent a few hours in the Microsoft Latvia office, during which we were introduced to the schedule of the following two days and we learnt to know each other (which entailed in itself trying to pronounce a series of exponentially more complicated names). Ok I am exaggerating here a bit, but you get the idea.

After that came probably the best part of the day. The place where we were going to stay for the evening and the next day was actually a small ski resort, so everybody had the opportunity to ski or snowboard for the next two and a half hours. For me it was especially interesting experience, because I had been skiing only once before in Estonia and the place had the second steepest slope in the Baltics. (Yes, I am aware that 80 meters high mountain is not even considered a mountain in many other parts of the world, but it is in the countries, where the highest peaks are no more than 300 meters from the sea level :)). The skiing was followed by a supper and a very long evening in the sauna. This is a tradition we all share, because for us sauna is 90% about socializing and 10% about washing. In a classical sense it was not a very productive day, because we did not make any presentations, but we definitely learnt to know each other better and hopefully established some longer lasting connections.

Second day

The second day was much more constructive. Right after the breakfast we had three presentations. The first was about Live Mesh and was given by me and Jaana, another MSP from Estonia. Next one to speak was former Lithuanian MSP and current MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Sergejus, who told us about his interesting experience as an intern in Redmond, where he had worked for Windows Live OneCare team. Last presentations in this block was from Ivars, who spoke about XNA Game Studio and demonstrated how easy it is create games for PC, XBOX, and ZUNE. This one was also very educational, because for me it was the first encounter with XNA.

After the lunch, Jaana and Janis spoke about Microsoft User Groups in Estonia and Latvia respectively and gave us a hindsight how they work. I think that these two presentations where the most important ones during the whole meeting, because better understanding of how the organizations work makes it possible to learn from each other and find the ways to cooperate. In addition, these presentations also set the context for the upcoming brainstorming session, where we tried to come up with different activities to propose to the user group members and sought to find the ways to help them get over their fears and encourage them to make presentations at user group events.

Conclusion

In addition to being a really fun and cool event, I am sure it also gave us the perspective of how things are done in the countries and encouraged us to find more ways to cooperate. For example we have already agreed with a Latvian MSP Davis, that he is coming to Estonia to visit our user group meeting in Tartu and we have plans to go some time later to Ventspils. Finally I would like to thank Dace from Microsoft Latvia for organizing this wonderful event and making it all happen. Hopefully this tradition continues in the future.