With a new college like ours, it’s important to realize that as the first few batches, we have a responsibility to define the campus culture. Personally, I’d like to see the college moving to a more technical culture, but when you do that, you face quite a few problems.
Most projects will go through quite a few stages in their life cycles – in hardware projects at least, since you’re typically operating with some delays, your progress goes through various spurts of interest and productivity; you spend a weekend working on something and then ignore it for a month while you wait for your boards/parts to get shipped from china.Unfortunately, very often people lose interest, get distracted, run out of funds etc and the projects get abandoned. Any work that’s been done just languishes in a corner forever.
Another problem that you frequently encounter is the idea of a technology treadmill – the moment you follow various projects blogs or websites, it’s really easy to get intimidated. You could be sitting in your dorm room learning how to program an 8 bit AVR (which will teach you a huge amount about electronics, micro controllers and embedded programming) while someone you know or follow posts a really slick looking web app built on the latest flavour of JavaScript. Because that’s newer tech and frankly, more sexy, it’s easy to look down on your own project and think that it isn’t worth working on any more. You start to feel isolated and under appreciated and again, your project gets abandoned and languishes in a corner forever.
Technology is like a treadmill – there’s so much that you could be learning, that you get pulled in every direction, because curious, innovative people find everything interesting. It’s important that you force yourself to keep pushing, because otherwise you’re just going to fall off the treadmill. You’ve got to keep your nose to the grindstone and head to the stars. But it often takes a little bit of perspective to realize that your project isn’t crap. That it’s actually worth the time and effort and energy you’re putting into it, even if it’s not sexy or full of the latest buzzwords.
To this end, It’s important to find a community of like minded people to interact with. This is the sort of community you find in Maker/Hacker Spaces and perhaps why coworking is becoming so incredibly popular all across the world. You need to know people that can answer your questions, people that appreciate the project you’re working on. This is where campus culture and enters the picture. It’s important to have a culture that embraces engineering, celebrates success and perhaps most importantly accepts failure without judgement. ACM would like to help build this culture on campus. In the past, we’ve tried to focus on workshops; I thought that giving people skills is an easy way to motivate them. Obviously, I was wrong.
This is the 21st century, people have access to incredible resources and they’re smart enough to teach themselves. Instead we’re going to try and collaborate with everyone to build this community. We’re reaching out to other societies and organizations to help organize events, we’re also going to hold at least 1 project fair per semester, where anyone can come, show off what they’re working on, so that people can get interested, learn what some of the awesome people on campus are building and potentially collaborate with them to do something even cooler.
Hopefully, we should also have some lab space ready soon, which we think would help create a place where students can come and collaborate on projects or just hang out and offer to help anyone that needs it. We’d also appreciate input on what more we could be doing to help build this engineering culture on campus.