How to host successful workshops on college campuses
If you’re thinking about hosting a workshop for student but have no clue how to proceed, I don’t blame you. Students nowadays seem to spend their days at home watching online lecture webcasts and endlessly tagging each other in meme groups about how much the college life sucks.
What could possibly make these students want to come out and spend a few hours of their precious time at a workshop?
The value proposition for a workshop
There’s really no getting around how lazy students are. You have to entice us to come, and there are three needs of a student developer that you can woo:
- I need a job/internship
- I need to pass my classes
- I want to learn and solve cool problems
What’s this workshop about and what can I get out of it?
It’s not always about technical skills
With a wealth of knowledge, there’s plenty more you can share besides building our own ETH20 token. Examples of some extremely helpful skills (that aren’t taught in classes) are:
- Working a career fair and how to build your network
- How to prepare and what to expect at an interview
- Communication etiquette for emails and in-person chats
- Design thinking/problem solving outside of a classroom
You might’ve noticed that I didn’t put “How to build an incredible resume” in there. This is on purpose. There are tonnes of resume workshops and resources that students can use online as it is an extremely saturated field. Try to use your time, experience, and knowledge to provide something unique and different — and tie it into technology too!
Choose your topic carefully
First and foremost, you should ask yourself “Is this something students genuinely want to go out of their way to learn?” At school, we already learn plenty about data structures, databases, networking, security, etc. We don’t need another workshop about those.
We have a solid foundation for software engineering, but more often than not, we lack real-world applications for our knowledge. Can you teach us how to use Python to classify dogs vs cats? Or maybe use machine learning to calculate our chances of survival on the Titanic?
The key is to choose a topic that’s engaging, fun, and useful. Technical, but not too much — the skills that we learn should be a solid foundation which we can build off of.
Buzzwords and hot topics are great
As annoyed as you are about overhearing words like “deep learning”, “blockchain”, “distributed systems” — they actually make fantastic topics to talk about. Students are lazy, but we want to be in the know too! Sometimes we’re just too lazy to figure out what the hype about blockchain is about. We would jump at the opportunity where we can not only learn about it, but also conduct a hands-on application.
Introduction to hot buzzword topics make engaging workshops and let the attendees walk away feeling a bit smarter.
Keep it not too complicated
If you decide to host a hands-on workshop, try to keep the setup as painless as possible. Often times, even installing and setting up NodeJS can take up over a fourth of the setup time.
Consider using online environments such as Azure Notebooks!
Marketing your workshop
You’ve got your topic. You’ve got your slides. You’ve got the code. What’s next?This is probably the most difficult aspect to hosting a workshop. There are so many platforms and things to consider such as event venue, whether or not you should bring food, raffle materials, swag, etc. I’ll break it down as best as I can.
Facebook is king
If you’re looking to host an event for students, there’s really no other platform besides Facebook. Furthermore, Facebook has groups specifically for Universities where students spend most of their engagement. There are specialized groups for “Jobs and Internships”, “Computer Science”, and more that could be used to promote.
Additionally, the best part about Facebook is that when I show that I’m interested in an event, all of my friends see it too which allows the event to become viral. Consider also running a small targeted ad campaign for students too!
Don’t have an email for the school you want to host the workshop? Try this..
Partner with a student organization on campus
This is probably the easiest way to hold a workshop. Student organizations often hold their own workshops to promote themselves, and having an industry professional or representative will not only increase popularity for them, but also helps them establish legitimacy.
Their members and student reach provide a leverage for promoting events that you as an individual otherwise wouldn’t have. They will also take care of finding a venue, setting up AV, marketing, and promotion, so all you have to do is worry about the rest. In fact, as an outsider, you might not even be allowed to book rooms!
Food is optional
Let me repeat that. Food is optional. Yes, just about every tech event now has catered pizza from Costco, but if your workshop topic is interesting, that itself should be the main promotion factor. Food should enhance the workshop experience, not be the main reason why people are attending. Furthermore, greasy fingers and laptops don’t mix well.
In my personal experience, we’ve found that snacks are a much better use of money vs pizza. Buying in bulk from Costco or Amazon Prime Now, a bag of chips, rice cripsy, and other snacks are about a quarter each whereas a whole pizza that feeds 4 runs over $10.
What to raffle
Budget permitting, raffling off tech products could be a good way to drive attendance. Smart home products like Google Home, game systems like a Nintendo Switch, and bluetooth speakers like the Sonos One are highly desired luxuries.
Final Thoughts
Hosting workshops is no easy feat. It takes a combination of time, effort, commitment, a good network, and luck to host one successfully. I wish you guys the best, and hope that you can build long-term meaningful relationships with your attendees!
I’ll leave you guys with some tips:
- Do some research for when the best time is to post on Facebook
- Try to mention a company name in the event title
- See if you can bring an industry professional to give a talk (if you’re a student hosting a workshop)
- Aesthetics matter. Try to use templates for the event cover photo
- Go early and set up AV before the event
- Tuesdays and Thursdays make the best time of week, afternoon/night is the best time of day
- Aim for earlier in the semester/quarter, where students aren’t bombarded by exams and homework yet
- Try to time soft skills workshops before a career fair
s/o to Susan Ibach for the blogging tips!
About me
Kairui (pronounced kai — ray) is a Microsoft Student Partner at UC Berkeley and has held many workshops throughout the 2017–18 school year. All of the information above are my own observations, lessons, and opinions that I’ve learned over the months. This is also for the UC Berkeley student community, so things could be different where you are!
