Engineering Week Day #1 – Post-mortem

I have to say, I was definitely disheartened by the opening ceremonies of Engineering Week here at Columbia. After coming out of Devfest, I may have exorbitantly high expectations of student groups and the events they throw, but… well, I can’t justify away the way I felt about the event that happened 15 minutes ago. I’ll pick my way through why I didn’t like the event, and contrast it to Devfest as I go along.

Who in the world needs to pad their opening ceremonies such that more time is spent entertaining than having talking heads do what they do best? Various student groups came in and entertained with dance and song, which in the opening event for something called engineering week was pointless. The rest of the event content was also pointless. It was almost like the event was saying “Ahoy! We are the engineers… that say we are engineers!”[1] As a recurring event, maybe mediocrity and faked enthusiasm is to be expected, but it doesn’t have to be devoid of any substantiative content. To contrast, the opening event for Devfest was half an hour long, because we had shit to hack, and had only half an hour in which to get the newbies up to speed. No dance and song needed.

The event had one real speaker, a prominent Columbia professor. His introduction by the MC was pointless: you don’t have to list out every single thing the guy has done, especially if the list is longer than most people’s arms. Just a quick “this guy is cool, you should listen to him because he can science your brain into dust” would’ve sufficed. Then the professor gave an interesting talk, and after the event ended, everyone rushed the shirts while he walked out alone. This is a two-fold failing: at Devfest, we handed out the shirts at the beginning because that was not why people were there, and we didn’t have to bribe them to stay: if you were there, you were there to hack. If people were there to take advantage of the event, they stuck around for the food and hopefully learned something from the workshops. Also, keeping the shirts ransom ensured that no one was around to talk to the prominent professor, who surely has advice and a multitude of things to talk about with a budding engineer. After the end of Devfest, we stood around and talked for at least half an hour with all the speakers, and only stopped talking because everyone was leaving to watch the superbowl.

Food – after this event, I think that letting people sit down to eat is a bad idea. If it’s in a smaller space, then everyone can talk to each other: if everyone is standing up, it’s easy to network by walking over to someone. But sitting down? You have so much potential energy to overcome, along with all sorts of social conventions, just to go and try to talk to someone else. People mostly sat with people they knew, and talked about the same old things they always do. The opening lunch of Devfest was a mad melee of conversation and idea trading.

The MC did not know how to MC. Sure, you know the people on stage and are best buddies, but no one else cares about your internal “bro” structure. Everyone does care about how well you can speak. Ryan kept the opening of Devfest professional, coherent, and informative.

Finally, the rest of the schedule is cause for concern: only 2 events have any substance (a panel and a speed networking event), and the rest of the schedule is just social cruft. And they call this an engineering week?

I guess I’ll be teaching myself Bison for a few more events.

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[1] – yes, that’s my sad attempt at making a Monty Python ref. I’ll try harder next time