In an older comment on this blog, Roo said:

Maybe initially it is your workplace (boss/manager) who’s got the responsibility of the care and feeding of your growing career/skills. However, if you take a close look around – it may take some careful observation – you will notice that the hierarchy doesn’t rise very far when it comes to technical skills. In the end, every geek ends up owning the problem of keeping themselves challenged.

I don’t have a satisfactory answer. I already know that I don’t deal well with this situation when it inevitably comes up. Still, here are some the ideas I’ve thought of.

The naïve answer is to find a new job or seek out more challenges at my current job; this is obviously not a sustainable solution.¹ You’ll have to constantly move around; would even be able to stay in the same place long enough to contribute something meaningful? How long can you continue to ad responsibilities at your current job and still expect to fulfill them?

As Simon Law pointed out quite simply, “There is a big problem of skill plateau with this strategy. I prefer constant self-directed learning.”

What are your solutions?

1. Bring an engineer

When I was looking for a job this way I had my own set of criteria to fill. Does the company work on interesting projects? Are the people friendly, motivated and intelligent? Would I learn something from an internship there? I was hungry for technical details of the products they were working on. I’d ask about programming languages, APIs, frameworks and problem solving. I needed to know that there were interesting technical challenges inherent in the products. That’s the kind of thing that would pique my curiosity and get me to apply.

Naturally, if there wasn’t an engineer or developer behind the career-fair booth I would quickly lose interest and move on over to another booth. This is why if you’re company is looking to recruit technical students, you should always have an engineer or developer behind the booth¹. Technical-minded students will want to hear some technically interesting reasons to go work for you.

2. Make First Contact

When I was a student, attending career fairs was a ritual. I made it a point to go to every booth and ask all the companies present what they were about and what kind of job they were looking to fill. Being proactive at career fairs is what landed me internships despite the fact that I was never part of any co-op or placement program. It wasn’t tricky; all I had to do was walk up to the booth and say “Hi! What does your company do?”

The problem is that most students won’t do this. Most students will simply walk by a booth without saying anything or even taking a closer look (unless your swag is really, really compelling). This is why as a recruiter you have to be the one to make first contact. Those students that are meandering past your booth might be just the ones you’re looking for, but you’d never know it unless you stopped them and started telling them about all the cool stuff you do. Better yet…

3. Have a demo

The booths that attract the most attention at career fairs typically have some live demo available. Maybe even something interactive. When I attended the University of Ottawa High-Tech Career Fair last month, we brought a number of cameras as well as a couple of servers to show off our video surveillance software. I even brought a BlackBerry Bold and an iPhone to show off the Mobile project that my team and I have been working on for the past 10 months. You can bet a number of students were impressed when I showed them I could control the camera in my company’s parking lot — 200km away — using my phone.

Not only is it extremely rewarding to show off the project you’ve been working on, but it’s important to show the students that you have a tangible product. Having something that they can see and feel and interact with is a great way to pitch your company. You can say: “This is what we do. This is what you can do.”

4. Be Energetic

We have a corporate policy that forbids us to sit down behind the booth during a career fair. We’re not allowed to look bored. If you look bored, people will think your company is boring. Even if you’re tired and your feet hurt, you need attack recruitment with the same drive and energy that you apply to the work you’re really passionate about.²

Stay on your feet, and speak passionately and energetically with every student that walks by. Be excited about what you’re telling them (not too excited). Excitement and enthusiasm will make potential candidates excited, too.

5. Avoid Corporate Stock Photos

You know what I’m talking about. Those generic images of the every-company. Generic-looking, smiling business people in suits sitting around an all-white conference table. Pictures of random cityscapes that could be anywhere. I’m talking about the kind of stuff that appears when you do a Google Image Search for “corporate”. This image might be attractive to your enterprise clients, but it’s not attractive to students. Especially not technical students.

Stock photos obscure the message of what your company actually does. Without that message, students will just walk by your booth as if it’s invisible. There’s nothing distinctive that shouts “You want to work here!!”. If you don’t have a demo to _show anyone what you do then you’re really screwed. Instead of showing generic stock photos, you should show pictures of what your company actually looks like, or some photos of your products being used in the field. You want people to see your company culture for what it is, and you should be proud to show it off to a potential new recruit!³

Some of the best booth displays I’ve seen that do this well include Microsoft’s “Hey Genius!” campaign from a few years ago and of course Shopify‘s “Be Awesome”.

Yet life wasn’t all roses. The disconnect between my life as a student and and professional office life wasn’t something I had a lot of trouble coping with. I moved back to Montreal one year ago because I decided that it was much more important to enjoy my life and spend time with my friends. I declined the offer to work remotely from Montreal and keep my job on the Garbage Collection team because I didn’t want to be isolated from my team. Unfortunately, the team I’ve been working with over the past year is nothing like the one I was working on in Ottawa.

On the bright side, this past year has given me the time figure myself out. I spent the time conversing with my mentor (who has kept me sane and focused), and chatting up dozens of people all over IBM to get an idea and a feel for where I would belong. One of the biggest advantages of a huge company like IBM is the diversity of its teams. Especially in Canada, where IBM grew out many acquisitions, the culture varies greatly from team to team. Talking to people from all different types of teams in different parts of the business helped me figure what I wanted out of my career.

Knowing what I wanted was the key step in figuring out where I should be going. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I looked hard enough I could find what I wanted, whether it was in IBM or not. I began to get discouraged, however, when I realized that Montreal lacks a bustling tech scene. Unless you want to work in videogames, your options are quite limited. As far as IBM is concerned, the teams that interested were all either back in Ottawa, or in Markham. I started to feel like staying in Montreal was holding back my career.

Writing about my experiences on this blog turned out be the best thing I could have done. Little did I know several of my friends, acquaintances, former classmates and colleagues actually read it. It didn’t take long for them to start telling me about the jobs that they have and enjoy, and offered to refer me to their employers. Shortly thereafter I had a two-week period where there was an interview of some kind every single day.

The company I decided to go with was also the first company to make me an offer. That company is Genetec. I was impressed with how quickly they got me through their hiring process. Right after applying, a friend of mine (whom I didn’t even know worked there) called me to let me know how much he loved the place and it’s atmosphere. When I went to visit the lab I fell in love with the environment. My gut feeling told me that I would be quite happy there.

Even then, I was hesitant to accept the offer right away. I wanted to see what my other options were and compare what different companies could offer me. The clincher was when I was participating at Les Jeux de Génies du Québec as a “parrain”. The team from Université de Sherbrooke was walking around with giant Genetec logos on their clothes. The fact that the company was so ready and willing to continually invest in student life spoke loudly to me. It solidified the initial feeling I had that I belonged at Genetec.

As for the project, I’ll be part of a brand new team building a brand new product from inception to deployment. This is an opportunity that I’ve been looking for since I graduated. I don’t get the feeling that it comes along very often. I’m very excited to start this new chapter in my career.

I’d like to express some gratitude and thank everyone who has helped me along the way, especially my mentors and all the IBMers that spoke with me over the last year.

So long and thanks for all the fish. :-)

If you keep repeating this process, you’ll notice a pattern. Each time you start learning a new technique, built upon an old technique, there’s a lot of work involved. You focus your mental energy on understanding the differences. Eventually you become comfortable with the new technique, and it no longer requires much effort. You can perform it without thinking. Once you can perform without thinking, you’re not growing that skill anymore; the thing you’ve just learned becomes another tool on your bat-belt which can be used to learn and grow newer, more challenging techniques. In order to grow and become better at something, you must keep learning new things, applying the techniques you’ve mastered and developing new ones.

Streets of Rage was a series of beat-’em-up games for the Sega Genesis. One of the most interesting features of its gameplay was that the bosses at the end of a level became standard enemies in the following levels. In order to continue through the game you were forced to trivialize the enemies that at one time provided a significant challenge. Next thing you know, you’re fighting six of them at once and you can do it while yawning.

What kept the game interesting is that you’d have to keep growing your bad-guy-fighting skills. Each level introduced new mini-bosses and bosses that prepared you for the later bosses. How boring do you think Streets of Rage would be if, after beating the first boss, that boss was the only enemy you fought for the rest of the game? It wouldn’t matter if he came at you in swarms, eventually you’d become so comfortable and efficient at defeating him that the game wouldn’t be challenging anymore.

This same concept is something I look for in my professional life. I want bigger and better challenges. If I keep fixing the same kinds of bugs day-in and day-out, using the same tools, performing the same tasks, I’m not growing as a software developer. Skills which have become trivial for me are tools that I can use to learn more complex skills.

The ideal challenge is something that’s just beyond my abilities. Close enough that I’m confident enough to do it, and far enough away that I need to really stretch on tip-toes to reach it. Eventually I’ll get comfortable with it, I’ll be a little taller, and I can reach a little higher.

1. Face-to-Face Collaboration

I want to work with people in person. This could mean brainstorming together, bouncing ideas and solutions off of each other, and helping each other learn. It could include gathering around a whiteboard, or even a pad of paper, or getting two or more people huddled around a computer monitor trying to solve some nasty little bug. Or pair programming. Two heads are better than one and communication is infinitely more efficient if you have two people sitting together side-by-side. Some things that take hours to explain over the phone, instant messaging or e-mail can take mere minutes to explain in person. You can save all this time and extra frustration by just pulling up a chair next to someone else.

2. Friends

I’d love to have coworkers whom I can relate to on a social and cultural level. I want coworkers whom I can be friends with. The advantages of working with friends are endless. Collaboration amongst people who know each other well and get along is so much more meaningful. The small distractions that friends provide at the workplace, such as sharing a clever comic or YouTube video, add some positive energy to the environment. Something so simple as having a friend to eat lunch with can make a world of difference in a day that might otherwise be spent in isolation. These relationships extend beyond the boundaries of the workplace and become real, meaningful friendships. Going to a bar after work for happy hour, catching a movie on Tuesday night or heading to the Just For Laughs festival together are all things that coworkers who are also friends with each other can do. In short, it makes sitting in an office more lively.

3. Challenge Me

My university career was spent learning, developing and honing my technical, social and communication skills. My internships and my first year out of school have given me some practical experience. In order to grow, learn and master these skills I need to challenge them. I would love to be working on tasks that are just beyond the reach of my abilities, forcing me to learn something new or apply my skills in new ways. Naturally, every job will have some tedious aspect to it, but a sufficient challenge can be a reward for sticking through the menial parts and make everything worth it. The trick is finding those occasional projects that make me say “This is why I love this job.”

4. Talk To Me

Just as I seek out technical challenges to practice my technical skills, I need a forum for improving my communication skills. Unlike the stereotypical “geek”, I’m an extrovert. I love to talk, socialize and explain. I welcome open discussions and sometimes I like to play devil’s advocate. I thought that the ability to communicate effectively was secondary to my technical skills but what I’ve learned over the past year is that communication is a skill that needs to be cultivated. I’ve also learned that I need to communicate as much as I need a technical challenge, if not more so. The main reason I come into the office everyday is because it’s less lonely than sitting in my apartment. I only exercise my option to “work from home” if I have an excessive backlog of laundry to do. (In other words, it’s better than showing up to work in my pyjamas because I’m out of clothes).

5. Lifestyle and Location

Like others of my generation, I work to live. Money and wealth are not my primary motivators. Life should be about living. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that I can confidently say “I love my life.” If that’s not happening, then I know I need to do some moving and shaking. When I was working in Ottawa, my job was pretty awesome. I regularly had technical challenges and was working with a team of ridiculously smart people. After a few months, however, I learned that I simply couldn’t live in Ottawa. I found that I was sacrificing my lifestyle for the sake of my job. No job could replace the friends, entertainment and culture that I had enjoyed throughout my time in Montreal. It seems obvious now, but it was a tough lesson. I learned that the city I live in has an immense impact on my happiness and well-being. I need to be able to do the things that I love doing, whether it’s attending the Fantasia Film Festival, Nuit Blanche, the Eureka Science Fair or simply hanging out with my beloved friends. The bottom line is that my job must enable me to live my life to the fullest, or better yet be a part of what makes my life worth living.

It’s taken me a full year, but I feel like I’ve finally been able to state with confidence what I want out of my career and where it fits in with the rest of my life. Now that I know what I’m looking for I’m in a much better position to find it. World, here I come.

Why do we need so much encouragement to do what we love? If we love to do it why aren’t we doing it already? Too often we get stuck thinking that it’s just not that easy, but is that really true or is it just a cop-out on our parts? Maybe when I say “not now” I’m really just too scared of what might happen. It’s no surprise then, that those same keynote presentations very often tell us to take incredible risks.

It’s one thing to be risky, but it’s a very short step to being reckless. “Taking risks” doesn’t mean doing something stupid without thinking of the potential consequences, it means doing something with a high probability of failure with a potential for great success. You have to know what that failure can entail and you have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario, even though you might not know what success will bring. In her keynote presentation at this year’s CUSEC, Leah Culver talked about dropping everything and moving to San Francisco. “What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked. Her answer was “Well, I go back to Minnesota and live with my parents.”

Before you even get to the point where you’re ready to take risks to do what you love, you have to know what it is you love, don’t you? You have to put your heart and mind into it, focus on it, and when the time is right make your move. And therein lies the challenge. How do you know what you love? Every job is going to have its share of grunt work, whether you’re working for yourself, or a startup, or a mega corporation. It could be dealing with bureaucratic overhead, your clients or your mom. Po Bronson phrased this sentiment very well:

The right question is, How can I find something that moves my heart, so that the inevitable crap storm is bearable?

That’s a lot easier said than done. The very first step lies in figuring out who I am, what I like, what I don’t like, what I can grin and bear and what will eventually lead to breakdown. Only once I’ve got enough of that nailed down can I really start looking at where I belong and what I should be doing with my life and my career.

I’m currently working on a team in a small software lab where the vast majority of people work from home regularly. I’m often one of maybe five people (out of 15, I think, but I don’t know for sure) who actually show up to work every day. Our lab may be small, but that’s at least 2/3 of my coworkers and teammates that I almost never see. Taking into account the support representatives and customer service people, who are my liaisons in debugging client problems, and the QE team and developers in India, I realized that I haven’t even physically met half of my coworkers.

Ignore for a moment the overhead of using collaboration tools versus working in a co-located environment, or the problems inherent in time zone differences, because those are other points that, though important, are not the one that concerns me most. Instead, think about the social, psychological human consequences of working remotely from coworkers whom you’ve never met — and possibly may never meet. Establishing a relationship with these people of the same calibre that one could establish with a co-located physical human being is simply impossible. Our brains are wired to notice and process various minutiae of human-to-human interaction including but not limited to: body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, hand gestures and eye contact. These aren’t simply additives to the human-to-human communication experience, but they are key factors in how we, as human beings, communicate. They aide us in building a mental perception of the people that we meet, and this enables us to communicate infinitely more effectively with that person than we would ever be able to had we never met them.

The consequence of not having face-time is that we are unable to build accurate mental models of the people we are communicating with. We don’t know their quirks or their personality. In effect, we don’t know what makes them them. Communicating with them over SameTime, E-Mail or even the telephone will leave us with a gap in our understanding of them. The information that our brains would normally be processing in a physical environment is missing. We have to work that much harder at clarifying our ideas and explaining ourselves clearly, when a simple whiteboard drawing coupled with some hand gestures might have done the same job in a fraction of the time. We must make every effort to remove irony and humour from our speech in order to avoid possible misunderstanding, which has the unfortunate side effect of making us sound altogether like very boring people. We act less like humans, and more like robots.

When I saw Fred Brooks, Jr. give a presentation at ooPSLA in 2007, there was one point in particular that made a deep impression. (You can download an mp3 of the talk here).

“Face-time is crucial. Telecollaboration really works among people who already have spent a lot of face time together. And it really works quite well in those cases. Absent that, travel to get the face time is worth what it takes. And people instinctively know that and so the airplanes stay full.

I don’t believe that “telecollaboration” is impossible, but I do believe that it’s impossible to build any sort of meaningful relationship with someone whom you never physically see, or whom you physically encounter infrequently. Face-time is most crucial in the early stages of getting to know someone. This is when we build our mental models of that person and develop a context in which to understand them. That context is what enables us to communicate effectively with that person even if we’re not in the same physical space. In other words, once we have established a context for a relationship with another person, the overhead of remote communication drops dramatically. I would even make the comparison to a long-distance relationship with a significant other: once a relationship is already established, being physically distant even for extended periods of time is challenging but not insurmountable. Eventually you will still need to meet face-to-face.

I often feel like I expend more energy trying to compensate for the lack of real human contact than focusing on my primary job role. One of the biggest factors that attracted me to IBM was my experience as Extreme Blue intern, where every day would be spent working closely with each of my 3 other team members. Asking a question meant wheeling my chair into an adjacent cubicle. That’s about as direct and as quick as one can get. My teammates were more to me than just coworkers, they were my colleagues and friends. Coming to work every day was a pleasure because it had as much to do with social interaction as getting things done. Contrast with my experience as a full timer, where asking a question today means getting an e-mail response tomorrow, and the only time people talk to one another is to assign them work.

A cubicle is a very lonely and quiet place when you have no one physically next to you.

The way sponsorship works at CUSEC is fairly straightforward. We put together a sponsorship package which we send out to companies that we think will be interested in. The package is just a document gives a brief idea of what CUSEC is, who the delegates are and what our previous sponsors have said. It also includes a list of sponsorship “levels”, each of which has a price tag associated with it. Each level also includes a number of benefits such as: a booth during the career fair, the ability to supply bag inserts, their logo displayed prominently and having conference rooms “named” after them.

Most companies are willing to pay a significant sum to have access to top notch students, and those are the kinds of students we have at CUSEC. That’s not just hearsay. The feedback we get from our sponsors is astounding. They are extremely pleased with the recruits they get from CUSEC. Many of my friends found their full time jobs through CUSEC, as did I. As Tim Bray said:

everybody I know in the biz is hungry for talent, and here are 350 kids, a high proportion of them about to graduate, who care enough about what they’re doing to take the trouble to go to a three-day conference including a Saturday. Talk about self-selecting good candidates.

We begin negotiating with companies in the late summer and early fall. By October we begin to finalize the contracts, and by November we get them signed. The money starts to roll in during December and January, which is all well and good since most of our expenses aren’t due until the conference actually starts. We’re actually very flexible with how we work with our sponsors. The costs of our packages can be mixed and matched with merchandise to give out at the closing ceremonies, or a service that’s provided to us free of charge.

This year, we were negotiating with a record number of companies. We started off incredibly strong and had garnered a lot of interest. As per our normal operating procedure we expected to finalize the contracts starting in October … then poof. A lot of companies lost a lot of money. Hiring freezes were everywhere, and few had the budget to spend on recruiting. And believe me, many of these companies tried to dig pretty deep, too. Their HR departments know how valuable it is to recruit at CUSEC. But there’s a limit to how much you can compromise. The danger is that if you make a special deal with one sponsor, you run the risk of another sponsor finding out about it. Then you could up in a situation where Initrode complains that Initech paid less money but got a bigger booth, or more exposure, or something like that. Maintaining a trustworthy relationship with our sponsors is something very important to us, so we make sure to treat them equally and fairly.

Suffice it to say our sponsorship packages aren’t cheap. They provide a huge chunk of our funding. Conferences are expensive to run, and CUSEC is no exception. The money has to come from somewhere, and if it all came from delegates it would cost a hell of a lot more than $60 per person. Here are just some of the factors that go into the costs.

Booking the conference centre. Even though January is a relatively slow season, this ain’t cheap. We need two conference rooms and open space for three full days (and nights). This includes tons of hidden costs that go beyond simply holding the rooms: there need to be a Maitre D’ to oversee the event; there needs to be internet on site, since the hotel’s basic wireless can’t handle so many connections; staff needs to be hired to deliver and clean up the coffee, keep the water jugs filled, and all these other little details.

Coffee during transitions. Yup, each coffee break costs money. And these are usually per-person charges (and it’s more expensive than Starbuck’s. No, seriously). We have to estimate how many people will drink coffee (or tea) and order enough for that amount. We usually underestimate, because if we fail to reach the minimum then we get charged for the excess. This is how conference centres operate. In addition to that, every conference centre I’ve ever known has a rule against bringing in outside food. This is both because the centres’ caterers maintain a monopoly on the food served on site, and also because the centre is responsible should anyone come down with food poisoning. So we can’t simply run to Tim Horton’s and bring back a few giant jugs of coffee. (Likewise, we also can’t run to Subway and bring back 400 sandwiches.)

Keynote speakers are the foundation of the conference. We make sure to treat them very well. If we’ve invited a keynote speaker, we will pay for their transportation to Montreal, their stay at the hotel, and for their food during the conference. We don’t pay the keynote speakers to speak. Instead, we cover their expenses so that it shouldn’t cost them anything. This is a significant portion of our budget, but it is certainly not one we’re willing to compromise. The experience we give our speakers is what encourages more speakers to come, and the wonderful things our speakers have said makes it all worth it. We want to bring the best speakers we possibly can, and this is a sure-fire way to ensure that they have few excuses for not coming.

Miscellaneous little things that all add up: t-shirts, nametags, printing the proceedings, printing up posters to display on campuses, and various incidentals that happen while the conference is running. These may not seem like much but believe me they add up. The only perks that organizers get as far as our budget is concerned are a complimentary stay in the hotel as well as lunch and dinner all three days. We’re pretty strict with what we’ll reimburse our organizers for, and in fact we even have strict limits on how much our meals can cost. (Also, CUSEC will never pay for alcohol. That’s what my credit card is for… :-S)

Banquets, Cocktails, etc., which we didn’t have this year, because we simply couldn’t afford them. A banquet isn’t cheap. You need to hire caterers, book a ballroom, pay for the staff, bar, and all the stuff that goes along with it. We made a decision very early on that unless we could afford to do a banquet properly this year, we weren’t going to do one. The banquet in CUSEC 2008 was a disaster. Some people were lucky enough to get their food in a reasonable amount of time, while others (like yours truly) were still awaiting their soup while people kept harassing them “Hey, Skrud! Where are we going drinking tonight!?!” and then by the time I finally got my meal and got out of the restaurant, the bar I had sent everyone to was so packed that I couldn’t even get in. Never again. (Note I am most certainly not the only one to have had a poor experience with that banquet. It got many more complaints than praise.)

A proper banquet is expensive. To hold it in a hotel or conference centre, you’re required to use that venue’s own caterers. They don’t come cheap. Would any of you have been satisfied if your seven-course meal consisted of seven slightly differently shaped lettuce leaves? This is also why CUSEC doesn’t provide catered lunches. If we wanted to hold the banquet elsewhere, such as at an external banquet hall where we could find our own caterers, then we’d be stuck with the trouble of getting people there and back. Banquet halls that aren’t in hotels or conference centres are also not usually downtown. This would mean adding the cost of hiring a shuttle bus, or paying for metro passes for everyone.

We were hoping to compromise and provide a cocktail instead of a banquet. Always thinking, we knew a cocktail would be less expensive. We could provide, say a single drink ticket (good for alcohol or a non-alcoholic beverage) and make the rest of the event a cash bar. If we had the extra cash, maybe some h’ors d’oeuvres as well. While it would’ve cost us less than half of a swanky banquet, the lower amount sponsorship this year meant that we had to cut it.

Sponsorship is a lot of work, and we had to stick to our guns and be incredibly persistent to get even the small number of sponsors you saw at the career fair. Our Director of Sponsorship, Juan, put in an incredible amount of effort and an astronomical amount of time to make it happen, cold-calling companies if she needed to, leaving voicemails and calling back, never taking “no” for an answer. CUSEC 2009 would never have happened if it weren’t for her efforts. Next time you see her, make sure to give her a hug.

To complicate matters further, CUSEC is dual-tracked. That means that except for keynote speakers, there would be two presentations going on simultaneously. This meant that we’d need to have two separate rooms. One big room that splits in two doesn’t work well because of the fact that it takes time to set up the barrier, and you’d have to have to sets of AV equipment which can be linked together for keynotes and then separated for dual-tracked sessions. We need two separate rooms. We also need room to host a career fair and for students to mingle.

Those of you that have attended CUSEC more than once will know that CUSEC has been growing steadily. In 2008, we had way too many people standing at the back. We had to add more chairs at the last minute. A lot of people have asked me why we didn’t return to that venue and the reason is, quite simply, the fact that they don’t have enough room for us. Those conference rooms we had in 2008? Yeah, they actually have a posted capacity of 280 people. We were well over 300 people jam packed in there. We were anticipating even more growth this year, and we knew that returning to that venue wouldn’t work for us again.

We explored nearly every hotel in the city and met with many of their managers. (And by “we” I mean that the bulk of the work was done by our Director of Logistics, Claudiu, and our Director of Events, Kyle.) A lot of the places we checked out which had adequate conference space also had prohibitively expensive hotel rooms, and we wouldn’t have accepted a higher price than $100 per night for quad occupancy. Yes, our students crash four people to a room ¹. The good news is that booking some fifty rooms in a hotel during an otherwise low-occupancy period is a bargaining chip. And we got some pretty good offers, but none of them were good enough. We had to play hardball. (Again, by “we”, I mean Claudiu. The man is a star.)

I’ll spare you the grimy details, stories of near-success and near-failure — since I obviously can’t mention the names of all the people and hotels we dealt with. Eventually, we had to give up on the idea of hosting CUSEC in the same hotel that housed delegates, since we simply couldn’t work out the numbers. Suffice it to say that the venue we nailed this year had everything we needed (and in fact, had previously hosted CUSEC as well). They even offered us hotel rooms at a very inexpensive rate, but unfortunately they had very few rooms with two double beds, and so we opted to stay in the hotel across the street. If you’re wondering why the cost of the hotel was more than $100 per night — well, we had a near-unanimous decision amongst all the head delegates to go for it anyway, since the next-best option was to stay at a hotel that was a good 10 minute walk away.

Unfortunately, our venue didn’t have as much room as last year for the career fair and mingling. We thought the atrium (where the four booths were set up) was enough space, but apparently not. It was too crowded. The reason we want the career fair in an open lobby area is so that it’s visible. Delegates will see the booths as they transition between the two rooms, and as they go get coffee. One of the consistent notes of feedback we get from our sponsors is that they like the fact that they’re visible and not shoved into an anterior conference room down the hallway from the main conference. Hallways are the devil. If a delegate has to walk down a hallway to get somewhere, he or she will very likely simply not go. You might disagree, but after years of attending these kinds of events this is what I’ve noticed. An advantage of not having many sponsors this year was that we managed to fit the ones we did have into such a cramped space.

This was the first year we were looking for a venue that could accommodate such a large number of people, and indeed we expect CUSEC to grow even more in the future. This year taught us a lot, and that will help next year’s team decide on a venue as well.

September and October are no good because they’re too early. This would also require that all of our promotion and advertising happens over the summer, when fewer people around to get pitched to ². Not to mention that these months are full of orientation activities, and the new students are so disoriented that you won’t be able to sell a single ticket to them. Most of them won’t have even learned “Hello, World” yet, and something like CUSEC will just seem massively intimidating.

November is an interesting month, because it tends to be between midterms and finals. In fact, the Impact National Conference tends to be held around this time each year. The reason I don’t think it’s particularly feasible for CUSEC, though, is that we would still be alienating the first-year students. Again, many of them will be learning to program for the first time. While CUSEC hasn’t been that technical in recent years, I think at least one full semester studying software engineering or computer science should be a pre-requisite for attending CUSEC. You’ll have at least some idea of what’s going on.

December is an obvious one, as is April. Two words: exams, vacation. Even for the students that don’t study very hard, December and April are busy months filled with studying and cramming and exam-taking. Once exams are over, a lot of students leave town and go on vacation, or home for the holidays. Hosting a conference during winter break means no one will show up.

February is a complicated month. Each school has it’s “Reading Week” in February. While it might seem like a good idea to host a conference when everyone is off school for a mid-term break, note that schools often have different weeks off. Even McGill and Concordia can’t agree on when their reading week should occur. ETS doesn’t even get a full week, but two days. To make matters worse, when students aren’t on their week-long breaks, February tends to be jam-packed with midterms.

March can be lumped in with November, except that there is a lot more going on in March. This is when most universities hold their award and special ceremonies, for example the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, when engineering students in Canada are betrothed with an Iron Ring. These happen at various times throughout the month, and we would certainly lose any final year students should CUSEC conflict with their ceremony. There are various other award and scholarship ceremonies that carry a higher obligation. Another reason we don’t hold CUSEC in March is to avoid conflict with CS Games, which is an event that has a high overlap of participants with CUSEC. Also National Engineering Week Month occupies most students in engineering programs during the entire first week of March. This year, the Canadian University Technology Conference is being held in March — this very week — and I know Concordia is not sending a delegation because it conflicts with their engineering student awards banquet.

Last but not least, January is when hotels and conference centres are the cheapest. As a student-oriented conference (and a non-profit organization), we have to make sure that we can keep our operating costs low enough so that students can actually afford to attend. In January, hotels and conference centres are so desperate for attention that they’ll make insane deals just to fill up their rooms and take whatever they can get. The summer months are prime tourism season. Hotel rooms easily double and sometimes even quadruple in cost. Despite the fact that most students won’t even be thinking of school, let alone an extra-curricular conference in summer.

Another question I often get with regard to the dates is Why does CUSEC run from Thursday to Saturday instead of from Friday to Sunday? Students have to miss two full days of class to come attend CUSEC, and then have nothing to do on Sunday. One reason for this is a logistical one that has to do with our speakers. The keynote speakers that present at CUSEC are very often coming from the opposite end of the continent. In order to make sure that the CUSEC experience runs as smoothly as possible, we make sure they have the full day on Sunday to travel back home — wherever that may be. In some cases — as in the people coming from British Columbia or California — travel will easily take them an entire day. We want the speakers to stick around for as much of the conference as possible, so we make sure they have Sunday free to travel back. It would suck if all the speakers left on the second day and only one or two were sticking around for the third.

Having Sunday off is also leaves the door open for students to stick around Montreal for an extra day of sightseeing and tourism which, believe it or not, is an option that a lot of delegates actually do take. It also allows for students have the time to travel back themselves so that they don’t have to miss class on Monday. Finally, Sunday is a mental-health day for the organizers. We need the time to de-stress, unwind and take in everything that’s happened. It might be a little selfish, but trust me — we need it.