Can Techies Promote their work in an attractive manner?
I wanted to blog on this some time back as it is associated with the IEEE-ACM Seminar that we had at our college but got busy with my finals, projects, presentations, reports and all right after this seminar so couldn’t take time out to write on it. In our last semester each one of the graduating class had to write a research paper and when it was time for the final presentations we had two options in front of us:
a) either to go for the same old classroom presentations where most of the time ur purpose is to deliver a long "taqreer" trying to impress people about what you have worked on while the audience is either sleeping or having cramps in stomach as its their turn to present right after urs 
b) or the other option was to do something DIFFERENT
We choose the second one but then the question was WHAT to do and HOW to do it? There came our Coordinator (a man whom I feel I have learnt the most from during my BS). He said lets have an "IEEE-ACM Seminar" where you all would be required to present your papers and not only that u need to carry out a promotional campaign for this event as well. He said "If BBA and MBA ppl could market their halwa puri (referring to one the MBA projects that we had at SZABIST some time back) then why can’t you guys promote your academic work"
Techies are usually known to be lone souls who just want to sit in server rooms lost in their geeky stuff but things have rapidly changed these days. Now we the IT people are required to participate in all the business activities to achieve strategic advantages and so we can no longer stay being lone souls not having enough confidence to present our work in front of the world. Also when it comes to presentation…it should be catchy enough to attract even the non-technical people. So with all this in our mind we started out with the promotional campaign for the event. Designed loads of posters in a single day and placed them all around SZABIST. They were so colorful and funny that many people thought SZABIST is going to have a carnival but no it was purely an academic activity
Here are some of the posters that I designed. I wish I could put the pics of when all the posters (designed by others as well) were in place but sadly i don’t have ne pics 
Btw I even put some posters on trees 
. After all the purpose was to show that "Techies can PROMOTE their work and that too in ATTRACTIVE manner"
PS: I welcome readers’ opinion about the topic!
NOTE: The images used in the posters were taken from different websites and weren’t designed by me. One credit is already there..gonna put others soon.
Images Credit: http://www.mitre.org/news/the_edge/summer_04/images/semantic_web.jpg
Well its good that universities have realized the importance of presenting the goods. There was a time when the best CS graduates would lose because of weak communication skills. Selling is an art and it all starts with communication skills…I learnt that a bit late….but as long as I learnt it…
Comment by UTP — June 7, 2007 @ 9:54 pm
array waah, chaa gayihain aap aur aapki friend
I really like this idea of seminar put forwarded by your coordinator , actually you learn a lot from such things rather the usual class boring stuff …!
Comment by Asma — June 8, 2007 @ 1:29 pm
Well i was thinking that i could be entered as your listed friends
… nice meeting you !
Comment by Dr. Adnan — June 8, 2007 @ 11:48 pm
If i were in your place, i would have titled my blog: ‘REVENGE OF THE NERDS’. I am a perosn who strictly believed in technical people and how these generic management staff take away our inventions through their silly old marketing and management gimicks.
If your generation can manage what u build, then I see a bright future for science and technology back home as more tecnnology entrepreneurship will foster.
great post and posters
Comment by Atif Abdul-Rahman — June 9, 2007 @ 2:03 am
@UTP
Yeah I feel myself lucky to have been at a place where the admin understands the importance of communication and other soft skills and design the curriculum accordingly. But sadly i still know a lot of people who are so good at the technical stuff but still can’t sell themselves because they lack communication skills
@Asma
he he
kahan yaar chahain ge tu tub jub apna koi Google woogle banain…InshAllah…aaye ga woh din bhi….jub people would come to know abt Foogle ((fariha’s google) 
On a serious note..yes u do learn a lot. Our juniors were also present at this seminar and what we researched on could be turned into their final year projects…one student was interested on working on our idea
@Dr.Adnan
Welcome to the blog!
@Atif Abdul-Rahman
Welcome to the blog and thanks for liking the post as well as the posters
and yes u’ve suggested a great topic….he he…it really can be seen as techies’ revenge! This is just a starting….a lot more has to come and InshAllah we’ll succeed.
Comment by Fariha Akhtar — June 11, 2007 @ 12:46 am
well a unique effort i must say with regard to techies, i hope you were able to gather a larger audience then expected ,
:)
promoting in front of tech audience is a bit different then the general audience, and when targeting general audience , u have to speak their language, who are usually unable to appreciate the technical ingenuity of your concept.
btw I liked that “Are u fed up of boring ..” poster
Comment by Syed Faraz Mahmood — June 11, 2007 @ 6:30 pm
Technology has a lot more empowering potential than what is usually explored and talked about and events like this can really inculcate the feel of importance of technology and it is an added encouragement for people who do real work and then get to present it to a larger audience and get a pat on the back.
How did it go by the way? How many people attended and what was the general response to presenations?
Comment by Rakesh — June 15, 2007 @ 2:06 am
@ Fariha:
Presentation and Communication Skills does matter, One of our great teacher mostly says to me “Making Product is not enough, selling it is equally important, for that one should have communication skills” …… Even in 4th year, I have seen some fellows who cant speak in front of unknowns, Lack of Confidence…!
BTW, you guys have ACM and IEEE as one chapter?
Comment by Om Perkash — June 15, 2007 @ 2:15 am