Photo credit to Jorde Gordo on Unsplash
In my previous post about AIESEC, I talked about my journey in AIESEC so far over the past 3 or so months.
This time, I will write about my first AIESEC conference, AnnualCo. The conference was held in Tallinn, the capital of a little country called Estonia (for the vast majority of those that do not know, it's here). It was organized for all local AIESEC entities in Estonia.
Expectations
I missed the first conference of my term as a member for school-related reasons but fortunately could attend this conference.
I heard from the people that went to the previous conference, that it's a fantastic experience, so I was obviously very excited to go. I was expecting lots of interesting sessions, dancing and fun.
Spoiler alert: my expectations were correct but incomplete.
The first day
The timetable for the conference that was on the backside of our badges
The first day we obviously had a check-in and an opening. Our conference chair(man) was Mehdi from Tunisia, who has been in AIESEC for a very long time and has held many positions in different AIESEC committees.
After he had told us about his life, we got to know the conference rules and guidelines, which is pretty self-explanatory.
We didn't have many sessions on the first day since the conference started after school had ended for most people, but we did have a Global Village in the evening along with a Viking themed party. Since AIESEC is an international organization and has many international members even on the local level like in Estonia, we have events called global villages, where people from different cultures and countries bring some food or drinks that is mainly only known in their country.
We Estonians brought black bread, some other food and of course Kohuke, which is a treat eaten here in Estonia. It's a small bar of curd that has chocolate around it and sometimes it also has some caramel or jam in it. It's very delicious even though I can't eat it anymore since I found out this fall that I'm lactose intolerant.
We also had an Italian and a person from the Netherlands, they both brought snacks from their countries. I distinctly remember the Italian table having wine and some other cookies. The Netherlands table had stroopwafels, which is are Dutch syrup waffles. They are one of the most delicious treats I've ever eaten.
The second day
The Start
The second day was much more focused on sessions during the day. After the morning plenary, we had a motivational session called "Live it UP!" which was fairly interesting (however, I can't remember the exact content of the session, sorry).
The Way I Lead
After that session, we had three sessions side-by-side. One session was for executive board members (and executive board member elects) + team leaders, and for the team members, we had two sessions that I do not know the details of since I'm an executive board member-elect.
During our (executive board members and team leaders) session we talked about how we want to lead the organization forwards and did a SWOT analysis of our local committees. The session was held by the current AIESEC in Helsinki local committee president.
This session was extremely useful for me and all other executive board elects since we have to start actually leading our local committees from February. Besides AIESEC, the skills and practice I got from this section will be useful in many different situations whenever more sophisticated planning is needed for an organization.
Picture from "The way I lead" session
LEAD Sessions
Then came the LEAD session, which was a collection of sessions happening at the same time. You could choose from different sessions which one you wanted to attend. This time I chose the "empowering others" session.
During the "empowering others" session, our instructor (perhaps not the right word here) told us a personal story about how she changed from an "I can do all this better by myself" person to an "I can work better with a team" person and how a member of her committee became her boyfriend. It was a very heartwarming story that will be in my mind for a long time.
After she had told us the story, we talked about how having strong relationships with the people in your organization is incredibly important. We're lucky that the current executive board in my committee chose to focus more on members during this term because we have an incredibly tight bond between our members and it shows enough that other committees have noticed it.
We also talked about how we can strengthen the bond between the three local committees in Estonia. Sharing knowledge and guiding other local committees with things they happen to be struggling with were some of the ideas. However the realization of those ideas depends heavily on how we actually will implement them. One other idea that was proposed was a swap time - get one local committee president and swap them with another local committee's president.
Somewhat accurate illustrative image of me gaining new knowledge
Photo credit to Ben White
The Covens
After the LEAD sessions, we had The Covens, where people in the same functions/teams from different local committees and members committees get together to discuss how we can improve our process further.
In the covens 1.0, which happened on the second day, I was in the outgoing exchange covens. We talked about our marketing, what our process looks like, what kind of people do we target and when. We were given some tips on how we can improve our function and reach our goals.
In Estonia, we have a problem that we don't have a winter peak, so we need to focus more of our resources on getting as many people as possible to go on an internship or volunteering experience abroad during the summer, however, we still need the money from contracts to survive during the winter. This fact creates unnecessary stress for us during the winter because we are a student organization after all.
Photo credit to Calum MacAulay
After the covens, we had a product packaging session where we talked about how we can market AIESEC better for the people that may be interested in what we're offering. Our presenter brought examples of differences in proper marketing and how it affects the perception of the product. In our case, the product is our Global Entrepreneur, Global Talent and Global Volunteer products. The first two are internship experiences in startups and established companies respectively and the third one is our volunteering experiences product.
Photo credit to Elliott Stallion
Then came the elections. Our members' committee needed a new president because our previous president needed to step down due to health problems. We had a session during which all the local committee presidents could ask the candidate questions. The members of local committees could ask questions by sending the questions to their respective local committee presidents. In the end, the candidate got the confidence vote and was selected to be the members' committee president.
Photo credit to Dave Lastovskiy
Gala Night
We won awards! More specifically we won the "Extra Mile in Outgoing Exchange" award, the "Best Team Member" award and the "Best Leader" award. I'm super happy that the accomplishments of our best member and our local committee president were awarded. I'm also very proud of my fellow team members in outgoing exchange, I think we deserved the award.
Nordic Circle
Something that was not on the schedule, but we decided to do anyway with our local committee was the Nordic Circle. For those that don't know, Nordic Circle is a game/activity where stories both happy and sad can be shared. I think it's wonderful that our local committee has an atmosphere where people are free to talk about their feelings, which is what we did during the Nordic Circle. We shared our saddest stories, our happiest moments and what we are grateful for. Emotions were shared and stones were lifted from hearts. It's what we're here for - to support each other.
The Third Day
The Covens 2.0
As always, we had our morning activities, which I won't go into detail about since it's fairly standard, we had The Covens 2.0, this time I joined the talent management covens since I am an elect for a talent manager position.
We talked about the upcoming recruitment in February, which will be a national campaign. We discussed our target groups of people and the requirements that we have for them. During our discussions with the members' committee and other local committees, we realized that we don't have a common time available to do offline recruitment as a national campaign, which is a problem. The solution that we eventually went with was to start online recruitment at the same time and then start offline recruitments at different times. It's not the best solution, but with the limited time we had, it was the best of the proposed solutions.
Project Management
The project management session was perhaps the most useful session for me out of the whole conference. The presenters were people from a company called Helmes and they talked to us like the title would suggest, about project management and estimation. After a quick presentation about project management and estimation, we had a workshop where we used a game called Planning Poker to do estimations. I would explain the game here, but it would take too many words.
The knowledge we gained from them was extremely useful because using Planning Poker seems very realistic since the game is not hard to understand and can really speed up estimations of task complexity. In addition to speeding up the task complexity estimations it naturally, through discussion, helps find all the sides of the task being discussed, leading to less unexpected problems later on.
I will write a post in the future about what I learned from this session, but I don't know when I will do it yet.
The Way so Far
I won't go into detail about this session since it was very personal to the executive board members taking part of it. Just know that it was very wonderful.
Thoughts
This was my first conference and I absolutely loved the whole experience. I obviously can't put every moment into words because if a picture is already a thousand words, then how many words is a memory?
Tips for people organizing a conference
Tip #1
Make sure the food is good. Food is our energy and we depend on it. If you want happy people at your conference, make sure their energy supply is good. The food at this conference was really good and everyone liked it. There were options for all kinds of people - vegans and non-vegans, water and juice etc.
Tip #2
Make your snack table the place to hang out. Our snack table was in the middle of a hallway and there were almost no conversations happening there. Conferences are meant to be networking events alongside education events, please keep that in mind as you design your experiences at the conference.
Tip #3
People need time to relax. If that means that you need to leave out a session so that people can have some time to relax, then please do so. This point ties into the last one - for people to be able to network, they need free time to be able to do so. The evening should not be the only time that people can network, there should be time to do so during the day as well.
Closing
Conferences are wonderful experiences. If you can take part of one, then please do so. I went to my first one and will do my best to not miss out on the next one. Life is about experiences and people, this is just one part of the whole puzzle, go and find your way!
Thanks for the fantastic experience, you wonderful people!
Call to Action
If you reached the end of this post, congratulations! Please take the time to check out AIESEC! We have wonderful opportunities all over the world, just waiting for you! If you want to check us out, you can do so at https://aiesec.org.
TL;DR - I went to my first conference, it was wonderful and I will definitely go to more conferences. Read the post if you want to know more in detail about my experience.