Befefits of Free Techincal Workshops

In this article, I will explain how free technical workshops help the chapter, members and the department. Other chapter officers may post their comments, and thereby making this an even more valuable post.

There's Need

In today's hi-tech environment, technical skills such as C++, LaTeX, CPLEX, AMPL, SAS (and more) have become essential to have, and many students may not have had a chance to learn them. Often, there are not many formal courses availabel on these topics, and the students must learn them on their own. By providing such a workshop, the student chapter brings value to the memebrship and attarcts new memberships.


It Helps Build Rapport

Free technical workshops also help build the reputation of the chapter as 'useful', 'value adding' and seriously helping the students. Often these workshops improve the students' performance in the courses in the department, and their performances in the internships and jobs. The department head and faculty notice these activities and understand the benefits, and come forward to support the chapter by various means e.g. Funding, Printing, In-class announcement etc.

Become Visibile, And Popular

The regular notices, emails and fliers help provide your chapter the visibility. The members begin to feel themselves as part of the chapter because everybody wants to associate with a value adding and enjoy the positive experience.

Some Good Workshops:

MS-EXCEL, VBA

Excel is a very powerful tool, and majority of us dont use to its potential. Good expertise of Excel may help students in their day-to-day work at internship, and jobs, and course related assignments.

AMPL/CPLEX/CONCERT

Very useful in coursework, as well as internship and jobs. No university will have a formal course on these topics. In my expereince, this is one of the most appreciated workshops.

MATLAB

Very useful tool, this workshop is definitely inter-desciplinary. If you organize this workshop, make sure you advertise in all the departments and be prepared to see students from math, stats, mechanical, bio-sciences, and may be Animal Sciences too!!

SAS

A Very popular workshop if you intend to attract members from Business School, Statistics Department among others.

LaTeX

An extremely popular workshop, specially if LaTeX is a requirment in one or more course report and homework. The students will thank you from their heart.


Final Words:

1. Timing is very important. a LaTeX workshop is no good once they already learnt it by themselves and submitted the homework. AMPL/CPLEX workshop is no good after the project deadline is already passed. Always time the worksops right.

2. Planning ahead is a must. Organizing a worksop requires finding an instructor, and the instructor may be busy. Plan ahead so that you can conduct all the useful workshop in the right time. Usually, PhD students will be willing to conduct the workshop. Undergraduate and Masters students will be your audience. Check all the major course schedule to find the best date and time for each workshop.

3. A Little Incentive such as Pizza, Soda for audience would increase participation. If you do not have money, try to request Department Head, or University level sources to help you. A Pizza would be absolutely an ace card.

4. Recognition: Give recognition to the instructor by either providing a certificate or something else, just to appreciate his efforts. Dont forget to save pizza for him/her, because he/she sure wont have time to eat it before the workshop.

5. Make the workshop related information easily accessible to the members and faculty. This can be done by updating website frequently, and posting on the listserv etc.

6. And, finally, Be Innovative. Expect failures when you try something first time. Dont get discouraged. Sit with your team, and advisor, and come up with innovative solutions. Interact with other students chapters. Post your comments on this blog. Write to INFORMS for help.

Never give up, and you will create a tradition that would last, and you would have benefitted a number of students you cant even imagine.

Good Luck.

Everyone is invited to share their experiences and help other chapters and officers.

Money Money Money

Let me start by saying that money is important for running any organization. During my years as President of Mechanical Engineering Association at IIT Bombay in 1999, I have had the experience converting an IIT level competition to nation level event, which is now a (international level event) and in that year we raised a lot of money from sponsors. The success formula is no secret. Invariably, you approach former students and some companies. I tried the same stint here too. Wrote to many companies and also requested our former students who were now in influential positions in large corporations. I started writing even before the spring semester had begun and in the beginning I received a positive reply from ILOG. The whole team was very happy. But ILOG never funded us because of their changed marketing priorities. But in any case, we tried industries to fund. Letters were written, brochures were made and uploaded on the website. I emphasised on a very well maintained website, and insured that our activities level does not fall down and our membership based grows significantly high to attract industries. For example, SEC easily received so much funding because of their membership base and their outlook. Since we were new, we had to build our image. The kind of image that attracts industry is generally built over the years, but I had only one year to do whatever I can. Therefore, I made two strategies. One, short term, and second, long term. In short term, we were asking companies for small amount, as small as $100 or even $50. For the long term, we decided to build a alumni database and heavily market our activities to the current events so that after a few years when they assume positions to give, they remember us. So, keeping the long term gaols in mind, alumni website and alumni membership letters were prepared.

For immediate funding, we also approached the department. We actually had a very strong case. We were not only doing fun activities but also activities which department would like to support, the two most important of them were Free Technical Workshop, and Industry and Graduate Seminar series. The reasons are simple. Department just cant afford to offer workshops in matlab, c++ or LaTeX to their students, but would love the students to know that stuff. These workshops just filled the void. Second, the department had regular visitors for academic seminar every Monday, but there was no industry seminars. So INFORMS Industry Seminar just filled the void there too. Also, our HoD Dr. Peters has been trying very hard to build our department, and probably he saw in us the potential of filling all sorts of voids, and happily offered support for 1. Industry Seminar (As large as $1000) and Field Trip. A promise to support these two activities was a phenomenal moral booster. In the end, we did 5 Industry invited Seminars, in which every company paid almost $200 or more for Pizza as opposed to asking us for their travel and hotel expenses. The companies also paid their own travel related costs, collected resumes. All the company visitors were given the marketting material about the possibility of chapter funding. The success of seminars could be seen in the form of sky rocketing memberships, and popularity of the chapter.

As I wrote before, another source of money for an initiative like ours is former students. I was planning to talk to advisory council. It was like as if everything has fallen into place. When I came to know about the advisory council visit, I wrote to Dr. Peters a wish to make a presentation to them. This was towards the end of fall and we had a list full of activities, more than 100 members, and a lot of success stories to share. We made a short presentation to the advisory council and proposed a moderate budget for next years events and requested their support. The summer came and went, and by the beginning of fall I started making visits to Dr. Peters until one day he told me that he has received funding from 2 companies, and he will split the money between us and IIE chapter, and we got $2500. By the time we made our second presentation to the advisory council, we were awarded $3500 funding, in addition to the cost of Sodas and Coffee and Cookie. We received $150 from INFORMS, and about $1500 from Industry visits in the form of Seminar pizza sponsorship.

A closer look will reveal, that 90% of our attempts for funding failed. Industry did not sponsor us for their logos on our website or so. But what they did was to accept our invitation to visit us and support our expenses on food for that event. You may not realize, but its a smart move. If we host 10 seminars a year, and ask one company to sponsor our seminar series, we will ask them for about $1500, which is a pretty hard thing to get, given the condition that all you have is a membership of 100 or so. Therefore, we divided and asked each of them to support THIER own seminar. This way, the visitor didn't have to go through administrative procedures and we got all our events covered.

Our long term strategies will start paying off now. Slowly we will have more and more former students who would be in the hiring team of their companies and they have been made aware of the recruitment talk and industry seminar series. It will only become easier to get industry seminar speakers.

Advisory council will always support us as long as we keep on doing well in terms of our activities. Therefore, I am feeling ease at leaving the office of President. I can see that it is hard to fail the chapter now, as opposed to make is succeed when I joined.

Solectron Visit (Field Trip),Austin

 
 
 
  

Our First Field Trip (Solectron, Austin)

INFORMS Student Chapter's First Industry Visit: The idea of field visit has been there in my mind for a long time, but something or the other kept me from giving it a full try. In the beginning, the chapter was developing and needed a lot of work in order to carry on the initiative of the spring 07. There was already an overwhelming number of thigs going on. The idea was give a serious thought when Cesar and Joaquin brought it up in a very serious manner. The first problem was to identify the company that will be willing to host us. I have a few friends whom I called and asked if they would be interested. The first one being BNSF railway and Second being Solectron. Mr. Kevin Crook form BNSF had recently visited us in our invited industry seminar series and I was in touch with him as he had some interesting problem and he thoght one of our student member gave him an hint about trying out the problem. Mr. Kevin Crook is also an Aggie and always ready to go an extra step to help us with our activities. I started talking to him about a possible field visit and he agreed. We started to work on the details of the trip such as date/agenda etc. As it is Dr. Peters (HoD) was very impressed with our growth and activities including workshops and seminar series, during a casual meeting, I mentioned to him our activities and also mentioned the field visit. Dr. Peters immediately praised for the initiative and offered to extend financial support. In the mean time, one of our frinds/labmate and colleagues, Hui Lin had joined us as Social Activities coordinator at INFROMS Student chapter. She is a very enthsiastic lady with a passion for her position as a social activities coordinator. She saw the field visit as a combination of fun/social as well as learning activity and showed interest in coordinating this trip. This was our first break through. A passionate officer, financial support form the department and a passionate alumni to facilitate the field visit. We started making plans. On one day, Mr. Kevin told us that the problem is that their office is closed on weekends, and upon student surveys, we found that the field visit on a weekday is an impossibility. Therefore, even though we had all the necessary resources to do the field visit, we could not do the visit. End semester exams came, semester ended, people went home or to internships in the summer. In parallel I have been talking about a possible sponsorship, industry speaker with another friend of mine, Sam Mandroli, with whom I did many courses and shared my first office room in the department. He is a great person, with a lot of practical knowledge and understand importance of such initiative in a college environment. I petsred him about 7 to 8 months continuously but he and his bosses at Solectron were too busy with something or the other in their current project and just couldnt take the time out for us. This fall, we had to again get the industry speaker and all the things that we did last semester. I asked Sam if his project was over and he could help us with one of the activities. He told it is difficult to get a speaker because they are busy. In answer to that, I happen to mention to him about the field visit and within 1 day, he responded positively. I detailed out few things with him, and immeidately Hui was in touch with Sam continuosly. After a few iterations, we fianlized a date,Nov 11th. Preparation of the field trip began. Hui was handling it along with two other officers Chiwoo and Hao. They prepared a document detailing the imporatnce of the field trips, created a summary docuemnt about the Solectron. I remember I send that docuemnt to Sam for review and Sam said, "Homarjun, even I dont know so much about my company!". The passion of this team was just great and flier were posted and announcment were made. Our treasurer told that we have enough money to allocate $300 for the field trip and we made plans to hire a van for 12 to 15 people and go to the field trip. Hui and Team received 5 confirmations in 30 mins, 12 confirmation within next 12 hours and by the end of the next day she told me we had 20 participants. I requestd her to close it, but by the time we could act, we had an overwhelming response of 36 studnets and one faculty. The huge response was of course the result of a well written brochure, a well marketted event. In my view, also the reputation of the chapter in the eyes of the studnets played a role in receiving extra ordinary response. Now we re in whole lot different situation. We cancelled our plan of having vans, and went on for the chartered bus. We called university transportation department, unfortunately, Nov 11th being the game day, there was no bus availability. We reserved the buses. But thankfully, Dr. Uster, sensed safety as a concern and advised us to look for private chartered buses. We had difficulty in finding cahrtered bus. Ms. Claudia who helps us with a lot of our logsitics/adminsitrative work, was also quite sad because the trip was about to be cancelled. Finally, we found one private charter bus company who responded positively. But at a staggering high price of $1200. We were paying about $40 for each person. It was almost the money we had budgetted for the whole semester events. Anyways, we found the event valuable enough to go ahead with it. Hui/Joaquin/Panitan and myself worked for many hours to get the formalities done, university related preparation done. Emails sent. All the preparation were completed by about midnight. I am still working untill about 2am in the morning to oversee the last minute changes. This is how the first Field Visit of the TAMU INFORMS Student Chapter was made possible. The lessons learnt:

1. You may fail, but as long as you learn form it, and move on, you improve your chances of being succesfull in the next trial.
2. Dont worry if the progress is slow, even if it takes as long as 9 months to organize the first event, dont worry. Its inertia that is making it slower. Keep working on it, once you put it to roll, the next time, it wont take more than just a fraction of the time to organize the same event. First time is always hard, so dont be discouraged. We havent even done our first visit yet, and we have two more field visit offers (From BNSF and Haliburton lined up already, See!!)
3. Notice the formula: Exploring your contacts, Identifying and Building a Great Team, Motivating and Supporing the Team, Looking for resources, and being involved in every small thing related to untill the end so that the Team does not feel left alone. Also look for advise from Advisor, Head and other senior people. They are generally very kind to help the students, specially in such events as this.
4. Prepare well. Give your best shot at it. They say, "God is in details". Excellence build a reputation for your chapter and more and more people start wanting to associate for you.

UPDATE: After all this planning, we made a very successful trip. The Aggie spirit could be seenin every single activity for the field trip organized by Aggies at Solectron. They accepted resume, provided free lunch, gave presentaions to help the students. Following the trip, Mr. Chris has agreed to come to visit us for a seminar. Mr. Kenneth Hunter is discussing the possibilities of engaging few students for their Senior Design Project at Solectron. Also, they have happily invited us for a trip in future. All the participants have given great feedback. I will leave it to Hui Lin to elaborate on the field trip in detail.

I hope this will help future leaders of the informs chapter at texas a&m university to probably get motivated to get involed and BE INFORMS'ed.

The Award Ceremony 2006 Speech

Awards Announcement


Faculty members, deans, alumni and my colleagues


My name is Homarjun and I am the president of the INFORMS student chapter. It is my pleasure to share with you the success of the student chapter. The chapter was established 2 years ago and it already has the recognition to be one of the most active chapters in the nation. In the 14 weeks long semester, we have had 5 invited industry seminars, 4 graduate seminars, 4 technical workshops, weekly coffee hour social. There are efforts directed towards creating a alumni database to facilitate networking and maintaining relationship with the alma matter. We have a total 160 student members from 9 different departments now. We are organizing a farewell for the graduating class of spring 2006.

I would like to appreciate and recognize these officers and volunteers. I request to these officers to please stand up when I call their names. We have our elected officers. Ezgi Can Eren Vice President, Joaquin Torres, Secretary, Cesar (Treasurer). We have volunteering officers Panitan, Juan and Diego (Membership and Alumni Secretary) (Zubin Subedar and Bikram Sharda) Workshop Coordinators, Tarun Sharma and Julio (Coordinators: Seminar Series), Jagdish and Laxmi (IT Analysts) . Thanks to all the officers, I hope that you keep up the show going in the coming semester.

Moving on to the awards. INFORMS students chapter has initiated awards to the faculty members, staff, ex-officers of the chapter and student members to appreciate their academic, organizational and service related contribution in the area of OR/MS.

We begin with Appreciation Award – Staff. She has been of tremendous help to every graduate student. She has stood above and beyond the expectations in helping the Student Chapter, providing means and support for communication, gathering information. I request Ms. Judy Meeks to please come on the stage and receive the appreciation award.

Thank you everyone.

Next, we have appreciation award for ex-officers. We have two ex-officers to appreciate this year.

Appreciation Awards: Ex-Officers

Ezgi Can Eren.
Ezgi not only performed her duties rightfully, but went beyond and lead the the chapter in more than one occasions. I have no hesitation in saying that Ezgi single handedly coordinated newsletter and made it successful. I request Ezgi to please come on stage and receive the award.

Thank you everyone.

Burcu Baris Keskin

Burcu is the founder and the first president of the student chapter. Her efforts in establishing the chapter and then making it popular among the student are remarkable. It was Burcu’s leadership that made the chapter as successful as it is today. Traditions set by her will live long after she is gone and we are proud to present her the appreciation award. Now I request Burcu to please come on stage and receive the award.

Thanks

Next we have Student Appreciation Award; we have two student members who are receiving the award this year.

Fatih Mutlu
Fatih has been a graduate student which every professor may want to have. He has presented in almost every informs, was nominated for doctoral colloquium, stood runner up in SCALE conference Florida. Presented a talk in the informs graduate student seminar series. I think it is okay to call him Dr. Fatih Mutlu as he passed his PhD defense yesterday. Dr. Fatih Multu, please come on stage and receive the award.

Jung Jin Cho

Jung Jin Cho works with Dr. Yu Ding, and he participated in QSR paper competition and was among the finalists. He has presented in almost every informs, was nominated for doctoral colloquium. He also helped us organize the LaTeX workshop. I request Jung Jin Cho to please come on stage and receive the award.

"Faculty Appreciattion Award"

Dr. Sila Cetinkaya – Appreciation Award.
Dr. J. Eric Bickel – Appreciation Award.


Thank you very much.

---------------------------------

The awards were be given at the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Honors and Awards Banquet held on April 20th 2006.

The Making of Largest Student Chapter of INFORMS

For starters: TAMU Chapter of INFORMS is the largest student chapter in the USA. Could be In the world.


As my roommate and friend Abhishek will recollect, we used to have discussions about what can be done at the INFORMS student chapter, and at other avenues related to our professional circles. I am not sure if I have been able to implement all of the ideas that I may have raised during those discussions, but I am sure I have implemented quite a few of them as a President.

Well, I intend to scribe my thinking behind some of the initiatives that you see in the INFORMS Student chapter today. This will help future president in understanding why some of the initiatives were taken and may be motivate some more leaders. First, I want to state, that I admire Burcu, and in fact thank her for taking the initiative to establish the chapter. You cant imagine the effort it takes unless you try it yourselves. So, in order to assess 'weight' of my 'thanks', you will have to go and try to set up a new chapter, and then come back to read this just after 15 days. It is also evideint from the fact that Burcu has received Best Officers Award by INFORMS-TAMU and Judith Liebmann Award by INFORMS, in 2006 at Pittsburg meeting. SO hats off to her. I was secretary of INFORMS Student chapter, and she is modest enough to call us the founding team, where actually, she founded it alone and asked us to join the executive team. I was lucky to have some HTML skills that I was really of some use in her committee and created and maintained the website. In that one year as secretary, my interactions with INFORMS website, and in an effort to create our own website, I visited almost all the chapter websites and numerous other university websites. I used to get a number of ideas and discuss with Abhishek. Abhishek used to often tell, if you are having so many ideas, why dont you try to implement them. Finally, Abhishek nominated me for President.

It is a long journey since then. Each and every step was a learning step. In my presidential year at INFORMS-SC I have learnt a lot from those surrounding me, faculty, studedents and professionals. I dont want to name any because I am sure to forget a few. I want to thank everybody who was related to INFORMS-SC and contributed. Burcu holds a special place becuase we were labmates and she always felt that the chapter was "her baby" and was always interested in discussing with me if I had something to discuss. In just about one month, I shared some of the activities related news to her (that we have crossed 100 members mark etc.) and our growth as a chapter, and she used to say, "Homarjun, I am proud of you. I see the chapter nurturing well in your hands, and I am very happy". Now, I must say, amidst all the challenges, those words very very encouraging.

Now, in the first part I will talk about the strategy. I needed to identify and articulately state the chapter objectives. Then, I needed to answer "How to achieve these objectives"? You may be amazed, the whole success depends on how well you identified and articulated the objectgives and how well you implemented the methods you decided to use to realize the objectives. The first part was actually easy. INFORMS website states the objectives. Chapter constitution also does it. In my opinion, the difference lies in your understanding of the vision behind those objectives. Trying to understand the big picture and student chapter's role in that picture gives you much deeper understanding. From these objectives, I tried to build an activity list. For your reference, I have listed the objectives and the activities from my first presentation to the new student's orientation below.

Objectives

1.Encourage interest in the field of OR/MS
2.Facilitate communication and networking
3.Provide informal forum for OR/MS educational programs and opportunities
4.Provide informal means of sharing information about the methods and techniques of OR/MS
5.Present a forum of speakers who address OR/MS topics

Activities:

1. Industry Seminar
2. Graduate Student Seminar
3. Technical Workshops
4. Mini-Colloquium
5. Social Picnic, Field Trip, Sport events
6. Cookie and Coffee Hour

New Volunteer Positions
•Secretary-Memberships
•Secretary-Alumni Relations
•Coordinator-Socials
•Coordinator-Workshops
•Coordinator-Fund Raising
•Coordinator-Seminar

I would say these activities are not new. They exist in almost every chapter, and they in fact were conceived and also implemented in our chapter before also. The difference was the emphasis on the objective of spreading the awareness. To spread, we needed to raise the membership, and therefore raise the event participation and thereby increase awareness. In order to raise the membership and increase the scale of the event, we needed more people to help us. I designed a set of new positions and made a presentation for the new students who had just joined us. This is where the explosion started. With the small budget of couple of hundred dollars, we invested significant chunk of it in our first welcome party in which we served pizzas. Some 70 people attended and listened to the presentaion while eating pizzas. I think the students were sharp. They immediately understood the vision, and came forward to be a part of the chapters new team. It was unbelieavable. I had more applicants that positions. The team had a quick meeting and we immediately decided that a position can be held by any number of volunteers, they would just work as a team rather individuals. This idea was very successful. We didnt turn down a single volunteer. At one point, the total number of INFORMS officers reached as high as 20. It was a very hectic semester. Chapter conducted 5 Industry speaker seminars, 4 free technical workshops, 5 graduate students seminars, one farewell party for graduating students in just a short span of 10 weeks. It was an unbelieavable semester. Volunteers were excited. I remember, IE department awards ceremoney invitation go to all student organizations and this year, of the total 35 or so studnets, 20 were from INFORMS student chapter alone. INFORMS student chapter distributed ~7 awards to the faculty, staff and students. Dr. Peters jokingly said "If that is the rate, then INFORMS may have to have their own banquet next year". It was hard not to notice INFORMS chapter in the department.

Clearly a good team and good set of events is foundation of a successful organization. Since the objective was to grow the chapter, we prepared the answer for "Why should I join INFORMS Student Chapter?".

The students often have to learn some or the other new software to do well in the class. We identifies this as an opportunity to provide value to the members and the idea of workshop series was started. Being an IE, I stressed on the following.

1. Make it easy to enroll in the workshop. Make it online; the easiest methods for students.
2. Publicise well. (By All Means, Flier, Electronic,Word of mouth, and others)
3. A PULL system rather than a PUSH system. Give them what they want. So, if the desired workshop was not listed, they could suggest a new workshop. If the numbers were sufficient, we would arraneg the workshop.
4. Do it just in time. Its no point givind a workshop when the project is already over or started. Give it early enough.
5. Learn and improvise. Our friend and workshop coordinator Bikram came up with the idea of Feedback forms. We asked the participant to fill the forms. They were a great way to learn and improvise.

This simple strategy, gave us the first 100 members, and many volunteers and supporters. It raised the moral of the team and brought accolades from all corners of the department.

If asked, I give credit to the two events.
The Initiatives:

New Events:

Workshops
Industry Seminar Series
Farewell
Picnic
Prizes for Faculty, Staff, Volunteers

2006 Awards:

Staff: Judy Meeks
Graduate Student: Jung Jin Cho, Fatih Mutlu
Officer: Burcu Kesin , Ezgi Can Eren
Faculty: Dr. Sila Cetinkaya, Dr. Eric Bickel


push-button published newslettor

It probably is a lot to write in just one night, therefore in the days to come, I will explain that with what motivation all of these activities were initiated.