Learn, build, network, get employees, repeat. Those are the ideals that many software engineers, especially student software engineers live by. CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference) is a conference whose objective is to provide students opportunities to adhere to those ideals, but how well does the conference achieve that?
Learning and Building
Speakers
Speaker sessions come in two types: presentations and panels. In terms of interactivity with the audience, there was not any (which is fine). Occasionally, members of the audience could ask questions to presenters and panelists but that was it. As for the talks and presentations, the speakers gave good advice, but at least for me that advice was extremely repetitive and redundant. That’s not to say there were not any good speakers. In particular, I found Dylan Steen’s presentation extremely useful. He talked about he became a senior dev at lack. What stuck out to me was when he talked about how to keep a good work-life balance. Specifically, he talked about making sure upper management does not expect you to work extra hours without compensation.
Workshops
On paper, the workshops were opportunities for students to actively build their technical skills in a collaborative conference setting. While some workshops achieved these goals, others fell short. The best workshop split all of the attendees into four groups. We had around 35 minutes to create a backend using the official Pokemon TCG API that could perform certain tasks or operations. This forced us to collaborate with one another. However, the teams were too big so only a few people ended up doing the majority of the work. In totality, the workshops were hit and miss and I wish some of the lesser ones were more interactive and group-oriented rather than just a tutorial, which we could find hundreds of on YouTube.
Networking and Jobs
Career fair
The career fair was by far the most disappointing part of the conference in my opinion. There were two career fairs per day, so six in total. The problem was that there were only five companies there and it was the same 5 companies for all six. So if you were not interested in those companies, it was frankly useless. That’s not to say there were no benefits for there only being five companies. If you wanted to work at one of those companies you could somewhat build a relationship with their representatives over the three days. However, for most people, it was a letdown.
Networking
For a conference of small size, networking opportunities were surprisingly good. Due to the size of the conference, you could talk and connect with speakers, employers, and other students easily. You just had to put yourself out there. You theoretically could get to know everyone at the conference. Nevertheless, it still does not compare to the networking opportunities of larger conferences.
Final Thoughts
Was CUSEC 2023 worth it? As you can probably tell by the overall negative tone of this blog post, no. Nevertheless, that does not mean that I would not attend it in the future. When talking to one of the former volunteers of the conference, they said the conference had much more to offer in previous years. Specifically, they had three rooms where presentations, workshops, and panels would occur in unison compared to the one room this year, and they had more and bigger name companies (i.e. Amazon and Facebook). So, hopefully, the conference returns to previous years' standards in the future.