Workshop in Helsinki 20-27 November 2005

From idea to obsession

The idea of organizing a workshop in Helsinki was raised already in 2004, probably between the 3rd and the 4th glass of wine in the EESTEC Congress in Belgrade. Outi, Aki and Emmi had heard a lot of a weird professional event called Workshop but never taken part in any. Funny, as nobody in LC Helsinki had! The last Workshop in Helsinki had been back in 1996 or something, so naturally there was no experience of organizing one in our lines anymore. But brave (or crazy) as we are, we decided to compensate the experience with ambition and start sticking the LC with the idea of a WS.

In practise, the Big Project was kicked off in spring 2005. We decided to organize the workshop together with the Guild of Electrical Engineering, which is basically the thing that organizes all study and party related things for telecom, electrical engineering and nowadays also bioinformatics students. It was wise to do it like that since in the guild there is a certain group in which the people are “experts” in money raising and dealing with sponsors. That way we would avoid stepping on their feet and seducing the same sponsors as the guild has. After setting the Workshop topic to Smart House Technologies, we set the target to get eight companies to cooperate with us. And 8 we got! After many phone calls, deal offers, nice talk and smooth selling we succeeded to get enough partners to be convinced that the WS could actually take place in the next November. Cooperation partners (avoiding the word sponsor!) were Ensto, Schneider Electric, TeliaSonera, Elisa, Microsoft, KONE, YIT, VTT, from which the two first ones represent building technology solutions, two next ones are phone network operators, KONE makes escalators and elevators, YIT is building investor and VTT research institute. It didn’t matter that some companies represented the same kind of business branch, because one participant only got to visit half of the companies.

Also our Department of Electrical Engineering was pulled to join the project, and that led to an idea, that the Workshop could actually be arranged as a course, so that Finnish students could also take part in it and earn study credits with it. At the end in the Workshop there were 20 places for Finnish students with the possibility to include it in their studies and another 20 places for motivated EESTECers and the participants were chosen based on their essay with the topic “Living in 2020.”

Different people were assigned to take care of the companies, the course itself and the EESTEC leisure activities and step by step the cake started to was ready for the hungry participants.

Countdown

We got in total 20 EESTEC participants, from Budapest, Wroclaw, Koper, Novi Sad, Ljulbjana, Krakow, Istanbul, Craiova, Aachen, Zürich and Bucharest. With that much of people and especially that much of people from different LCs we soon faced the problem with logistics: everybody landing at different time, at different places and with different means of transport. Some let us know about their traveling planes only after they had already arrived to Finland! Sounds familiar? Well, 20 little monkeys were collected together and the program could start.

Party time… The week was planned so that Monday-Friday was more or less dedicated for the workshop and the weekend was for resetting the week and concentrating on bad life and partying. Every night there was a dinner together and some party with a theme such as “Stereotypical Finland” for which we had asked the guests to bring some costumes or other properties, or “Dancing party” with different kinds of dancing related gadgets like dancing mattress or Nintendo eye toy for kung-fu moves. On Thursday we took our guests to a disco for a student party and on Saturday they had time to explore the center of Helsinki while doing the City Rally and getting ready for conquering the night club Onnela’s dance floor. We also found important to show EESTEcers the famous Finnish technical student student sitsi-culture (sitsi=fancy dinner party with a lot of singing, drinking, socializing and making fool of yourself, to make it short) and that’s why we took the participants to a cottage, where nobody could disturb our party. Unfortunately there was no lake nor sea by the cottage but sauna maniacs understood to use the snow for cooling down.

… but only after work

The professional part of the week, thus the workshop was planned quite tight and it included a starting session on Monday, company visits on Tuesday and Wednesday from 8 am to 4 pm and group assignment on Thursday and Friday from 8 to 4 or until the assignment was done. For company visits the participants were divided into two groups A and B, both groups with 10 EESTECers and 10 Finnish students and groups assignments were done in a 4-5 person groups divided so, that each group would have both Finns and foreigners and at least one from group A and B. The task of the group assignment and also the goal of the Workshop was to create new concepts concerning Smart House technology. In practice, the participants would use the knowledge they have, based on their studies and the info they had gained during the company visits and write a report about their top 3 ideas. After the Workshop week Finnish student still had couple of days time to polish up the report and ideas and finish the report so that it could be handed-out as Smart House- course paper.

Sticks and roses

All in all, the organizers were pretty happy to be able to pull through first of all a course for 40 students and together with that an exchange for 20 EESTECers. Not everything worked as it was planned, and things like horrible accommodation and partly lack of money, time and organizers gave both to the organizing team and to the participants time to time grey hair. From the EESTEC point of view it was great to get so many nationalities to visit us and to fill our stomachs with weird liquor tastes, when in contrary from the professional point of you it was very disappointing and sad to see EESTECers disrespect to the Workshop by arriving after the WS had already officially started, not appearing to the company visits and not taking part in the group assignment. But at the end we were positively surprised to get more than 20 applications from EESTECers to take part in our event, all though it had been in the air that workshops are lacking the participants due to many overlapping events. But this was only our first try, so be prepared for our next better and mind-blowing Workshop!

http://sik.tky.fi/workshop/

written by: Emmi Rautkylä