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.