The Conference for Students, By Students.
Posted by Kyle Cotter on January 11, 2012
It’s Future of Web Design ‘09. Zac Gordon was crazy enough to drive four high school students to New York for this event. This is where I met Dan Philibin, the dedicated, passionate, high school student, making his way in the web industry. After listening to presentations and talking to the likes of Dan Cederholm, Mike Kus, and Elliot Jay Stocks, all of us were on a nerd high. It was at this point in time that the idea for a student based conference crossed our minds. We wanted a conference geared towards high school students that would make them want to join the industry. A conference to show them why the internet rocks.
We hit the ground running and planned a conference for April 9th, 2010. We attended Future of Web Design back in November. That left five months to plan, organize, and do something none of us had ever dreamed of doing. Somehow, we got David DeSandro to speak. Somehow, we got Dan to come down from Pennsylvania to be the keynote. Somehow, we pulled this off. That’s not to say it was without flaws. It was full of issues. But, I get to say I organized a conference at age 15. The event was successful enough that we went back and did it again the next year. And the next year. Which brings us to Friday, January 6th, 2012.
The third annual Student Web Conference. Now a senior in high school, I had one more shot at doing this. No doubt doing this the past two years taught me a lot. I was ready to go out with a bang. There was a major difference between this year’s conference and those of the past; Zac Gordon was no longer my teacher. With that being the case, I hadn’t even envisioned a conference happening this year. I thought it had run its course. Well, apparently, I was wrong. I found a faculty member to be my liaison between the administration and myself, and we were going to make this event happen. At this point it’s October, and we had established the conference to be January 6th. This left three months to organize everything, by myself.
I started thinking about speakers. Having networked with enough people in the area at various events, I had an idea of who I wanted. ExpressionEngine community member Trevor Davis was cool enough to be a speaker. Brian Talbot, User Experience designer at ThinkGeek also came. Yeah, I said someone from ThinkGeek came and spoke. Dan Philibin came again and reflected on what he’s done over the past few years. And for the keynote, the amazingly talented Martin Ringlein agreed to speak. The fact that the people I wanted to speak, agreed to do it, really pumped me up. Also the fact that David DeSandro, Russell Heimlich, and John Croston came just to come, made it worth my while.
The audience was going to be a group of high school students who were interested in computer programming and art. Though a select few knew about the web, the majority were mainly there out of curiosity. For the talks, I wanted to cover as much of the industry as possible. I wanted to hit on design, code, and business. And that’s exactly what we accomplished with the variety of speakers we had coming.
This event being a web conference, I wanted to make it relevant, fun, and interesting. EllisLab was kind enough to donate an ExpressionEngine license for me to give away. So, to enter into the drawing for the license, one would have to tweet something they learned during the event and tag it with a hashtag. This kept them engaged in the event all day, and was a great way to get them involved.
So, the day of the event came. By this point, I was fueled only by caffeine the past 72 hours. Everyone filed in, the speakers presented, everything was perfect. Having done this the past three years, this was the smoothest it had ever gone. Technical difficulties were minimal to non-existent. The speakers connected with the audience. The audience was attentive. I couldn’t have asked for it to have happened any better. I genuinely feel that the students learned something, or at least, a curiosity was sparked about what we all do everyday.
We had five speakers in total. Five people certainly can’t represent an entire industry, which is where my next crazy idea came from. As a finale to the event, I wanted to show a broader, more diverse, concept of the web industry. So, I turned to all the professionals I knew, and asked for a simple clip in Photo Booth having them say why they love this industry. The final result was amazing, and I think the students really benefited from seeing this.
What a way to end the event right? The entire day was surreal, and goes down as a success in my book. I really enjoyed hosting this the past three years, and honestly, planning it, though stressful, was a lot of fun. Perhaps one day I’ll try this type of thing again, but on a larger scale. We all love what we do, and there is no other industry who is as passionate as we are. If the students walked away with anything that day, that was it.
For those interested in reading a more in-depth view of this event, I wrote up a reflection on my blog.
