ACM AI in Review

For the past year, I have been the president of AI at UCLA, or ACM AI. Leading ACM AI has been a wonderful experience for me, and I would do it again in a heartbeat if need be. Luckily, ACM AI is now in the very capable hands of Rohan Varma and Adit Deshpande.

Leading a club is hard, and I wanted to share some of the things I learned over the past year.

But first off, I wanted to thank my team of officers. ACM AI wouldn’t be the club it is today without the hard work of Henry Yang, Ray Zhang, Kevin Wang, Daniel Li, Alex Guziak, Mahir Esufasi, Honglin Chen, Rodrigo Valle, and Wandi Liu

Concetrate your efforts

Our first event Fall Quarter, the ACM AI General Meeting was a complete disaster. I forgot to get a projector, so we ended up having to write out the slides on a whiteboard. I also way underestimated the number of people interested in coming. Around 100 people showed up, completely cramping the clubhouse. There wasn’t nearly enough food. Despite that, it was one of our more successful events, in terms of raw numbers, simply because it was the first event of fall quarter.

If I was able to redo my presidency, I would focus more on the first few events fall quarter, because these events set the tone for the rest of the school year. It’s when you’re able to reach a whole new class of eager freshmen. Make sure to put in the work over the summer so your first few events are well run. Putting in the work early also attracts the best and brightest to apply to become an ACM intern.

Handling logistics is tiring

Leading a club means you spend a lot of time booking rooms, ordering food, and running all sorts of errands. These tasks aren’t mentally challenging, but they are suprisingly sapping, and very time consuming. One thing that I ended up doing was to create an ACM AI event checklist to help streamline the process. Trying to streamline the process is key to avoiding burning out.

What’s even worse is that communication is a limiting factor. A week seems like plenty of time to plan an event, but when you have to book a room 5 days in advance, and you only meet in person once a week, time flies.

Consistency is key

All in all though, it’s not hard to book a room for an event, or to put together a presentation. We’ve had plenty of workshops with over 100+ attendees. The hardest part of leading a club is the consistency. Events need to happen weekly, whether there are midterms, finals, or other previous engagements. While you should focus on your most important events, you need to ensure a baseline for your events. No matter who’s leading workshops or reading groups, make sure they are prepared and able to answer basic questions.

Building a community is hard

No matter how hard you work, or how seamlessly your events run, it’ll still take a large amount of time and effort to be able to create a space where people feel welcomed and encouraged.

It’s important to keep this in mind and not freak out too much if attendance goes down. Just continue to focus on quality over quantity and eventually the tides will change.

Conclusion

Leading ACM AI was a wonderful experience that I enjoyed immensly. Although there were many areas where we could improve, I’m ultimately extremely proud of the work my team and I put in.