What’s For Dinner?

YOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Welcome back to WPI. I finally just settled in for C term… my last term ever!

I wanted to share some of my experiences from winter break. Of course I plan on writing about only the coolest stuff but smashing everything together for one blog seemed a bit too much for me… so stay tuned as I share some cool information little by little!

Alright, I titled this blog what’s for dinner because my buddy Pat created a WPI Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) networking dinner!

http://www.buzzillablog.com/2011/04/baby-dinner.html

Pat’s original motivation for creating this event was to link up Alumni with our current students to make sure they get the information they need to develop confidence and land those internships.

Somewhere throughout the process Pat tagged me in and I helped run the event.

We ended up having a very successful event. We had a professor open for us and some alumni key note speakers. The event itself had tons of food, about 14 companies and who knows how many students. The event definitely evolved throughout the planning process and even the day of the event. Students, in addition to gaining advice, insight and confidence, were able to hand their resumes over to some companies. Alumni, in addition to mentoring current students, had the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and old professors.I think it was a win for everyone. Thank you to everyone who showed up!

So where am I going with this? What I wanted to stress is the importance of connecting to a professional society. Taking the first stab at creating an event like this one was pretty stressful but had a really high reward. So in the future, in theory at least, the event will be pretty simple to organize and very self sustaining. The seniors who attended this year will be the alumni next year and that can cycle on forever. That’s efficiency at its finest (minimum effort, maximum reward). This will be a chance for me and Pat to give students the information that employers gave us throughout our time at WPI. Something that made me really happy is that this networking dinner trend is going strong over here at WPI. I noticed the WPI Computer science group, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is also hosting a networking dinner. I hope their event is just as successful as ours. I can’t wait to see what other groups put on networking dinners. My only bit of advice is once you find out about one of these events, make sure you sign up and attend!

For other advice visit my homies’ blogs!

Thanks for stoppin’ by
-Sam