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.

This first installment is about why we hold CUSEC in Montreal.

You may have noticed that each year, with only one exception in 2005, CUSEC has been held in Montreal. I often get asked why we don’t move CUSEC around, specifically I’ve heard the question “Why not Toronto?” at least twice each year for as long as I can remember. There are a number of reasons we keep CUSEC firmly planted in Montreal, and why we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The first reason is student density. Montreal has more post-secondary students per capita than any other city in North America ¹. This includes four major engineering schools each with Software Engineering programs: Concordia, McGill, École de Technologie Supérieur, and École Polytechnique. Concordia alone sends more delegates than any other school, with over 70 students each year.

The second reason is that Montreal is fun, and it most certainly has that reputation. To the students coming from quieter university towns, CUSEC is a good excuse to come to Montreal and party. The one year CUSEC was held in Ottawa, attendance dropped tremendously, and the increased cost of transportation and lodging was enough to discourage Concordians from coming out in their usual numbers. The fact that CUSEC includes a trip to Montreal is actually a very big draw for a lot of students, and a lot of them like to take the time to tour the city while they’re out here.

Then there’s real reason we keep CUSEC in Montreal: The legal drinking age in Quebec is 18. If we were to host the conference in Ontario, a significant portion of potential delegates wouldn’t bother to attend — especially those students are still 18 years old and hail from Quebec. Why would they travel to spend a weekend at a conference and be forced to skip the inevitable parties?

CUSEC is primarily an educational conference, and it always will be. However, even though the main focus of the conference is on content, we take the fun factor very seriously. I strongly believe that you will learn more from sitting down and having a beer with one of our keynote speakers than you would from being lectured at. That’s why the pub night has become such a tradition. I would feel terrible for anyone who had to miss out on a social event like that simply because they were underage. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to meet and network and socialize with students from other schools (and something I don’t think we did a great job with this year, but more on that in a future post).