Written by Jessica Spratley, Class of 2017.
From October 1st to October 4th, ACM hosted its 2015 Reflections | Projections Conference, the 21st iteration of the largest student-run tech conference in the Midwest. The event featured two career fairs, over a dozen speakers, and the Mechmania A.I. programming competition. Over 2,000 people attended the conference and over 150 people registered for the Mechmania.
The two career fairs were both opportunities for attendees to network with top-rate companies. The startup fair took place on the first of October (Thursday), and featured companies such as Avant, Sprout Social, Truepad, and a16z.
The second career fair lasted most of the second day of the conference; Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn are only a few of the companies that were present.
The end of the second day of the conference also featured the kick-off of the Mechmania competition. Teams of programmers would have a day to code an A.I. program that would attack and defend machine clusters on an emulated computer network designed by the Mechmania staff. This year’s winners, Dr. Lego, received Oculus Rifts. The teams that came in second and third place, Team 29 and Coffee respectively, also received prizes for their stellar efforts.
One of the biggest highlights of the conference was the speaker line-up. There were a total of 13 amazing speakers give talks throughout the conference, starting with Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta on Thursday and ending with Gopal Kakivaya, a CVP working on Microsoft Azure, on Sunday. Other speakers included Anna Patterson (the vice president of Engineering and Artificial Intelligence at Google), Winnie Cheng (the Chief Data Scientist at Bankrate), and Greg Baugues (a developer evangelist at Twilio). The talks touched on a variety of topics such as career paths, inventions, corporate dealings, and many more.
Overall, it was a busy, but successful weekend. Attendees were happy with the talks and the career fairs (and the free food, of course), and both speakers and company representatives enjoyed themselves. We at ACM hope to see everyone at next year’s conference!
Contributions from Milan Dasgupta, Class 2015 & Sujay Khandekar, Class 2017.
