Recently I was fortunate to be on the organising committee for Fully Connected, Cambridge’s popular student-ran machine learning conference aimed at undegraduates who aim to break into machine learning research. It is a day consisting of multiple keynote speakers, panels (concerning careers and the future of machine learning) and networking sessions. The event was first ran in 2022, and I gained a lot from it back then. As such when the opportunity arose to organise the event this year I decided to volunteer, since I thought it was a good cause.

What organising was like

While it seems on the surface that inviting a few speakers, panellists and a couple of faculty for a day is a simple task, it in fact is a highly complicated exercise in logistics and outreach. I will illustrate this with a few anecdotes below.

Cold emailing 101

The core difficulty of inviting speakers is the need to balance a diversity of topics and speaker backgrounds while being constrained by the fact that academics are busy people and will likely not be available on the day you proposed the event. To get 6 speakers, our 10 person organising committee must have emailed more than 100 people (and most of them just didn’t respond!)

Attention to detail is necessary

As an organiser of a large scale event, every detail must be attended to. One day before the event, one of our speakers emailed to say that they needed to bring their child along due to British School strikes. While this seemed like a simple request, I (who was in charge of the speaker’s attendence logistics) had to spend significant amounts of time consulting departmental regulations and our allergy list to ensure that this was okay.

Everything takes more time than you think

I joined the organising committee thinking that it would be a small time committment. However I was quickly proven wrong on this. Two hour weekly meetings, writing many (at times very long) emails and liasing with potential speakers through a mix of Zoom calls and emails combined to make this one of my largest time committments during the term. In fact, everything took at least double the amount of time that I anticipated. Saying this though, I also realised that a little planning can save a lot of time. For instance, after we started writing out pre-meeting agendas the duration of the meetings halved!

… and so much more

The above are only some of the things that I had to do as an organiser of the events, and excludes the many important duties performed by my fellow organisers. This included event advertising, finances, paperwork and also buying 1500 pounds worth of sandwiches for 200 people.

Conclusion

In all, the event was an restounding success. We were fortunate to be graced with many distinguished speakers (you can see them here) from institutions like Deepmind, MIT and of course Cambridge itself. The turnout was also very pleasing, with over 100 students from various subjects participating through the course of the day. Luckily, I had the chance to participate in most of the events, and it truly felt like drinking from a firehose (in a good way!) due to the sheer volume of information being presented. Finally, It would not be possible to end this blog post without thanking Euan and Theo who organised the event last year and whom were able to pass on their expertise to the rest of the organising committee (as well as make the final preparations at 3am on the day of the event!), as well as my other fellow organisers for making our work together a true pleasure.