Program Manager and Committee Role description

Most used skills

• Organization

• Outreach skills

• Consistently working with emails

• Comfortable with talking in front of groups

• Workshops and Mentor Meetings

• Familiarity with machines

• Creativity for coming up with events

• Leadership and collaboration skills

• Will be managing your own programming committee

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Overview of Program Manager Responsibilities

• Meet with the Programming committee weekly to plan events

• Interface with admins, leads, mentors, and users to plan and execute workshops and other events

• Plan events that increase public knowledge of machines in the spaces, and resources available to the students

• Find ways to increase user activity in the spaces

• Ex. raffle system

• Ensure all events are executed smoothly and safely

• Create detailed Itinerary of the event before it occurs 

• This prevents confusion or misunderstanding, which can lead users into being unwittingly unsafe.

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Workshops

• This is the main area of focus for the program manager

• Quality before quantity

• Advertising is essential

• Interface with student outreach lead for RSVPs, flyers, digital media

• Encourage entire committee to work with student outreach and other lead members

• Generate relevant incentives for Workshops

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Raffle system / User interaction event

• The raffle system is a new event this semester that replaced the point system and competitions

• Response has been overwhelmingly higher than prior systems

• Make sure to announce it early

• No criteria

• If it was made at least partially with the makerspaces, it counts

• This makes it less intimidating to submit

• Tally entries

• We were planning on counting at the end of the semester, so that we did not double count any entries

• Since the entries are in their own slack channel, the entries should be easy to find

• Award handout

• We were planning to cut out physical name tags for each entry, then do the drawing at the final I&E showcase

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Interfacing with admins, mentors, and users

• Be prompt! Users are expecting you to be on top of emails and slack messages

• 1 day is fine, a week is not

• A lot of the time you only have around a week turnaround with admins/mentors, so the sooner you can respond the better

• Everyone else will not be as prompt, so if you want a fast answer, the best way is to send it early

• Sending a follow up message is not rude, it is being diligent

• Expect to need to send follow ups with outside group

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Planning

• Try to make an itinerary early and stick to it

• Less stressful than coming up with a workshop on the fly

• Can leave time for a mentor to suggest a workshop

• The first weeks are stressful, but it helps later

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Current Committee: Mark Hofmeister and Rachel Eskander

"I love nothing more than sharing both my knowledge and the capabilities of the Makerspace with other students. It's tremendously gratifying to expose others to new engineering techniques and enable them with a greater breadth of skills to concretize ideas."-Mark