Being an engineering student, I always wanted to be a part of a technical fest, to organize and plan all the events, and at the same time have fun doing it. It’s always good to have an aberration and swing away from the usual semester chores, where all we are supposed to do is sit for lectures and complete journals.

So, I was the Co-ordinator for Voyager 2018 – the technical fest of IEEE-VIT, along with my fellow workforce member Akashdeep Singh. This was announced somewhere in October 2017 and planning for all the events began thereafter. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what my role as a co-ordinator was, since this was the first time such a position had been made. Nevertheless, we started with our work, brainstorming on ideas right from deciding upon the logo to the flow of events. Voyager 2018 in essence was a series of workshops, competitions and fun events which were aimed to kindle a spark among students to explore technology, develop a competitive spirit to learn, and enjoy themselves trying out new stuff. To carry out all the events successfully, we had to meticulously plan everything to avoid setbacks at the last moment. So, to ease up on our load and to give personalized attention to each event, we decided to assign individual event leads for all events.

(Schedule of Voyager 2018)

By the month of February, we were almost ready with all the planning and event details after numerous meetings and discussions on WhatsApp. Voyager 2018 commenced with an unveiling event in the college in which all the events that were lined up in the coming month were announced. Some of the events were open for students from other colleges as well.

(Game Development and Web Development Workshop)

The first two events were workshops on “Game Development” and “Web Development”. The response for the workshops was exhilarating, in spite of keeping them during the weekend. After the workshops, the entire week was scheduled with competitions and fun events, some of them running parallely. It was a bit challenging to manage parallel events; thanks to the event leads, all the events were conducted successfully and the response was great! Students, along with some enthusiastic professors enjoyed themselves participating in fun events and won prizes.

(Fun Events)

The last workshop was on “Machine Learning and Introduction to Deep Learning”, which was conducted by me and our ex-chairman Pushkar Mutha. I remember staying up for nights to prepare for the content and brainstorming on how to tone down difficult concepts for students and present them in a more lucid way. All of my hard work reaped results, as students seemed to have been engaged with the teaching style and kept up with the momentum of the workshop. The last event in Voyager-2018 was Shark Tank, an entrepreneurship event in which various teams pitched their B-Plans to the judges.

(Machine Learning and Introduction to Deep Learning Workshop)

“Behind every glorious façade, there is always hidden something ugly”.

Likewise, organizing an event in college is indeed a daunting task, especially if it comes with a budget attached to it; and Voyager had many such events under its hood. All the teams did their job very well and helped to make the entire fest a grand success – The Documentation team for all the proposals and reports, Creatives Team for the flexes, posters and the certificates, Publicity Team for publicizing all the events in person and through social media, Events team for ensuring the smooth flow of events and the Technical and Web teams to prepare all the technical content for events and workshops simultaneously.

Having pulled off many all-nighters to work on the events, along with handling academics and other commitments, the entire period from January to March was one of the most hectic, yet the most gratifying experiences of my engineering life. Thanks to the entire core for giving me the opportunity and my fellow workforce members for helping me out!

To the future coordinators, my advice would be to keep pushing your limits and make Voyager 2019 a grand success!