From Student to GOLD

SPAC - Student Professional Awareness Conference
Vishnu Pandey

There are three types of Student Professional Awareness events: SPACs (conferences), SPAVs (ventures), SPAWs (workshops).

But what is professional awareness? To keep it simple, it is to help understand and develop soft skills.

A SPAC must be non-technical, student planned and student run. Those who benefit most are the planners but it is also a way to recruit future IEEE volunteers and officers. Basically, this is a bridge between students and sections.

The new marketing slogan that is being used is "Is your degree enough?" These events will give them a leg up if there are 200 people waiting in line for 1 job.

Vishnu bought a lot of energy and passion to his talk.

STEP - Student Transition & Elevation Partnership
Jignasa Ray & Kheng Swee Goh

This relatively new program was created to target graduating college seniors. It gives you an opportunity to recognize them and inform them about opportunities in IEEE after college. This event can be held anytime (pref. end of school year), anywhere, is FUN and there is $500 financial support per event. A STEP manual, kit and vtools are available to help in planning and executing the event.

The presentation was very informative and reignited a fire for me to plan one of these this year.