From 4th to the 8th of March 2019, I had the pleasure of volunteering at QCon London, a tech event famous among professional software developers, engineers and architects. I came across the conference during my occasional routine of surfing the web to check out opportunities for continuing professional development. I was aware that conferences like QCon may not fit into the type that a PhD student would be sponsored by the university to attend given that delivery is mainly industry practitioner-driven. To substantiate that, the conference as at now does not offer any discounts for non-profit companies or students to attend; and there are no call for papers, technical paper submissions and publications afterwards. More so, the tickets were too pricey, with the full conference + workshop costing over £2500. Hence, I jumped at the opportunity to attend for free in exchange for my help as a volunteer.
What motivated my choice to volunteer
The idea of volunteering was impressed in my mind whilst at the machine learning summer school where I observed volunteers fully partake of the classes. I imagined it would be a great opportunity to learn new topics in the tech field that could relate to my research and how it fits into the wider picture of real-world applications. My vision for my PhD program is that it would be a time for dedicated research as well as professional development such that I emerge with depth of knowledge and robust experience. It’s also a chance for me to improve on skills like organisation, communication and teamworking. I saw it as the ideal platform to engage with professionals who are doing exploits in other horizons.
Volunteering at QCon - the full picture
We had the briefing on Sunday, the 3rd of March, at the venue, Queen Elizabeth II Convention Centre London, during which we did a tour round the floors where the sessions were to hold. On Monday I arrived at 6:30 am, to kick off the registration at 7am. Our main task at the registration desk was to welcome attendees, find their badges and give them basic information about the conference. Working in pairs, myself and colleague welcomed attendees whose first name started with letter ‘M’. Around 9am we went into the main hall for the keynote by Sarah Wells. That was the only time we were required at the registration desks. On other days we assembled at the volunteers room, picked up our T-shirts and room monitoring materials and went to our assigned rooms. We were given new shirts everyday [Monday – blue, Tuesday – pink, Wednesday – orange, and a bonus Thursday – ash]. Our role basically was to count the number of attendees in a room, show timing signs to speakers, take votes with the voting boxes and report any technical or general issues in the rooms we were assigned.
The fun and flip side
The experience was really awesome, and the event organisation and content was splendid. Some of the tracks I attended were great especially the AI without a PhD and Career Hacking tracks. I fully participated at the advanced session on Deep (Learn) Neural Networks with Pytorch. On the networking aspect, I don’t think I did too badly. Fortunately, I landed two other event opportunities at the conference through the contacts I met. The first was an invitation to the Tech It Forward hackathon event, which I attended the pre-session meeting on the Thursday of the conference week. The second is another volunteering role to a top conference for experienced Agilist professionals. The volunteers’ coordinators were really lovely people to work with and they were very understanding and supportive of our interests to benefit from the conference. It was a beautiful chance to bond with fellow volunteers who came from varied backgrounds and cultures. The program was well structured with enough breaks in-between session that held within ideal time slots: enough to keep audience attention. The food was exquisite, not the typical ‘sandwich lunch’ that one finds in meetings here in England but a ‘proper’ lunch. I got lots of freebies too! Generally, it was a refreshing time, the best way to spend time away from work doing work.
One aspect I thought could be improved on for future events was the way in which rooms were allocated to volunteers. During registration we were asked to choose our favourite tracks which was going to influence our room allocations. However, this did not work out quite well because the track sessions were held across different rooms in a day. According to them, it was a new development this year as they did a dynamic room allocation depending on the interests they received from the attendees. A remedial plan was to do a room swap with any other volunteer that was interested in the session. It didn’t really work for me especially the first and second day. Good a thing there are recorded videos and slides to fall back on.
I expected it would be a busy week so I had my mind prepared for it, but that meant that for the first two days, I was too fatigued to give much attention to networking. Despite having the opportunity to attend some of my choice sessions, I still had to find the balance between paying rapt attention and keeping track of communication on the WhatsApp volunteer group where updates were shared. This was where I needed to step up and my phone’s battery didn’t help either. It pained me that I lost track of the time we needed to converge for group pictures on the second and third day causing me to be missing in action. Infact, on the third day I had to plead with the coordinators for a picture with all volunteers at the end of the conference. It is great that we held volunteers’ meeting at the end of each day, and on the last day we took out time to give feedback about out experience to the coordinators.
That’s what I was up to that week, and it was a rich, refreshing and rewarding experience. There are several volunteering opportunities out there if this sounds like what might interest you. Know your motivation, check out what is available in your locality, sign up for it and most importantly, enjoy it!
Please leave your thoughts below, and if you have done any event volunteering in the past I would be happy to learn from your experience – how did you maximise it?
That was a mind blowing experience from you. You have really multivated me on the dynamic of volunteering. Every investment in well during has its pay back moment. Time will not permitte me to share my experience at one time a volunteer, though is a very long time as an undergraduate student. Volunteering as an ENACTUS (SIFE) member then.
But, the experience you shared has implanted inside me with great insight.
Thanks is just is more than a billion way to appreciate this article and platform.
Your dedication to achieve a set objective is highly inspiring….Keep advancing
Your dedication to achieving a set goal is inspiring and worth emulating…. keep advancing