Our original event was planned to run at the start of the year. But it was rushed, and ultimately because of lack of time and lack of organizing resources (i.e. the manpower to get the project moving), we postponed the plan. We rescheduled to target the start of the new academic year, and we also pared down our ideas somewhat… just to get something easy and simple going for the first time.
So, our first ever COM Tech Days (as we have chosen to call it), took off 2 days ago on 24th August 2011. Very simple affair. No banners. No food. But I’m quite encouraged by the response. It’s not an overwhelming crowd, but I’d say reasonably sized considering we only spammed email to the first and second year students, a freshmen orientation page on Facebook, and that’s about all the publicity we did. We didn’t even tell our staff, or people outside the school.
I’m now thinking about whether we could run this as a monthly event. Just a simple one hour talk in the afternoon just one day of every month. We could still run a bigger event once a year. But the idea of a monthly talk is to keep the momentum going, keep up the presence of the event, and continually pique people’s interest. Of course, on the other hand, there is the big issue of whether we can sustain such an effort. I’m still quite encouraged, however, that we might be able to work something out. We’ll definitely need a dedicated team of people to drive this.
One of the agenda behind COM Tech Days was to discover and meet up with students who are interested to join our Network Associates student helper program. We had been doing this every year through a Network Workshop previously. COM Tech Days replaces that.
What is this Network Associates program about? Well, most of what I’ve written before is still relevant, so read my previous post. If you’re interested, you’ll know how to contact me.