Have you ever tried organizing an international event using only the strength of your fellow student chapter members? If you did, then I have a question - how did you invite people worldwide to take part in it? Our chapter has been struggling with this for a while now – we have hosted several events of various scale and purpose in the past few years, and have always encountered the same problem: how to spread the word? Some of our members spent hours and days searching for contact details of various chapters from different regions before every international event – be it a simple Skype call or a major congress – each time we used days digging through Facebook, LinkedIn, or looking for chapter websites via Google. We have created our own database of contacts, but expanding it has always been difficult. After gathering our colleagues from parts of Europe, the US, Australia and Africa for a discussion, we realized that we are all encountering the same problem - and we tried to find a solution.
One might wonder – why is this so important? The answer is quite simple - there are students all over the world who would love to meet their future colleagues, learn something new, test themselves or explore new cultures (you can find a proof on the link below*). This is probably the reason why most of the students join SPE. So, the demand for international events exists, but sometimes it is hard to find out what global SPE student community has to offer. This brings us back to my first question – if you have an idea what to organize, have enough members to do so, and have the necessary financial support for this, how will you inform your colleagues worldwide that your chapter is ready to satisfy their need for learning, networking and, after all, travel?
Professional SPE Community has a very well structured calendar of SPE International events, available at spe.org. Student members, on the other hand, do not have anything like it – student events can only be found in the aforementioned calendar if they are organized by SPE International (e.g. Regional Paper Contests or Petrobowl qualifications). There is no common database of all student events of global importance, which are held throughout the year. Moreover, the student chapter database at spe.org does not provide contact details for many student chapters. This, of course, has to do with privacy policy, but is an issue nonetheless.
What’s curious is that, while spending hours to find Facebook or LinkedIn profiles of various chapter officers, we did not think of using an already existing social network, which was created especially for this purpose – we never considered using SPE Connect. This might sound absurd – but I believe we are not the only ones. Nevertheless, this resource has two major advantages: firstly, all SPE members are already registered there, and, secondly, it already has the necessary ‘infrastructure’ for informing fellow students about the events that are being organized by us – the Student Community ’Events’ tab. Each community has this tab, yet we in the Student Community do not use it at all – if you check it out, you will find that there is only one upcoming event in this tab. What’s interesting, though, is that this tab could be used just like spe.org calendar of events, if only student chapters had a habit of publishing their upcoming events here. Moreover, SPE Connect already has a team of professionals working on its maintenance; hence it is ready to start serving our needs right away.
This raises another important question: how to use this ‘Events’ tab properly? How to avoid turning it into a pile of spam that nobody really wants to read? Part of the answer lies in what I have already mentioned before – it is important that only events of global interest should be announced here; small inside-chapter events, conducted in national language (not English), are not interesting for the entire Student Community. In other words, this tab should be used to invite fellow students from different corners of the planet to join the event and participate, not simply inform others about our chapter’s activities. Apart from this, an event tab entry should contain as much relevant information as possible, because the less uncertainties there are about an event, the more likely are our colleagues to decide to participate. Therefore, an event entry should, at least, contain:
- a short description of the event
- link to the homepage of the event’s official site (if any)
- application deadlines
- contact information
- accommodation and food costs (average)
- information about everything the participant should organize by himself (e.g. visa, transportation…).
Finally, I must admit – using SPE Connect might not be the best solution for the problem of communication among student chapters. This resource also has its flaws, which are one of the reasons why it is not widely used by the students of SPE. Nevertheless, thanks to its aforementioned advantages, SPE Connect is the best solution we have at the moment. Therefore we should, before canceling it entirely as a communication option, admit that we, the students, have not actually given it a chance. If the chapters start using the ‘Events’ tab of the Student Community, everybody will, eventually, start expecting to find all relevant events there, and we, the students, will get our own structured calendar. Who knows - we might actually end up liking it a lot.
*
http://connect.spe.org/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=cea3c0ec-a16f-4d8b-b68f-256d49863f8c&CommunityKey=dd327c8f-7959-4a10-b0bf-18504420fdec&tab=digestviewer#bmcea3c0ec-a16f-4d8b-b68f-256d49863f8c
#Globalissues #Conferences #eventinformation #networking