Why You Should Conduct a Workshop: Reflections at NUS Statistics Society

What is a technical workshop?

A technical workshop is a short lesson, like a lecture or tutorial, that usually emphasises hands-on practice into a technical tool or concept. In 2020 and 2021, NUS Statistics Society conducted 8 technical workshops in total for NUS students and the wider community in Data Science SG. In this article, I share why I think you should experience conducting a technical workshop, based on my experience over 1 year directing the 9-member strong Workshop Team in the NUS Statistics Society 2020/21.

Building confidence and professionalism

Workshops build a sense of confidence and professionalism that is robustly adaptable to unexpected situations. Each workshop member is responsible for the workshop that their group is conducting. In semester 1, everyone was assigned to workshops that were their “specialty”, namely the SQL (a database query language), applied ML (machine learning) and ML theory workshops. Given prior knowledge in what everyone is supposed to present, everyone can instead focus on the workshop conducting skills required to run a workshop effectively. Behind every workshop is a full rehearsal a few days before.

Managing the unpredictability of live events

But inevitably, technical difficulties occur. During the SQL workshop with a large crowd of 167 viewers, Agatha lost wifi connection, but Michael Yang stepped up to the occasion to take over the content his partner had prepared for the workshop (a full hour of content), given his prior knowledge in SQL and the familiarity having had a rehearsal with his partner. On the other hand, Agatha, despite having prepared hours of effort in the workshop, dealt with the inevitable with grace, by itself is an admirable feat. Technical issues are a nature of live and online events, and to overcome them is an ability that only those who have gone through them can acquire.

On leadership as a necessity

Leadership is one of the core necessities in any endeavour. Before directing workshops at NUS Statistics Society, I was a workshop member at NUS Developer Student Club in AY2019/2020, presenting a series of 5 data science workshops, including one at Google Developer Space.

What made me make the switch to Statistics Society was the then and current president Joel Tan, who emphasised the flexibility of members to lead in their own style, anything from allowing us to decide the size of our team to the many new initiates we could try implementing over the year. This focus on member flexibility was shared across the society, and expressed in the many new initiatives we kick-started, such as memes on Instagram, publishing member-curated articles, a workshop collaboration with the psychology department and Data Science SG community, badminton sessions, and a monthly internal paper sharing club within the society, among many others. With good leadership, a good experience in the CCA will naturally follow. If this interests you, we are currently recruiting the next batch of leaders in the society!

Recruitment as a commitment

During the recruitment for the workshop team, I faced a difficulty - 8 people made it through my interview (difficult as described by many), but most teams only had at most 5 members. Here is the dilemma: Having a large team can mean some members might not be meaningfully engaged if there wasn’t much work to do, while planning more work to do means that much more responsibility and organisation was required by me to commit to over the year. After much consideration, I decided against randomly selecting an arbitrarily smaller number of members, as it was unfair to those who did qualify but were not selected, accepted all 8 people, and readied to commit to more work. With a large 9-man strong team, the amount of work was great, but I believe the team felt was especially fulfilling as we conducted 8 impactful workshops with over 800 peak unique concurrent workshop participants, across the short span of a year! 

Experience over outcomes

As a society, the shared value across the society emphasises on the experience of members. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were very few opportunities to meet up in person, much less for team bonding. In fact, all meetings in semester 1 were conducted online and all workshops across the year were conducted online.

As a commitment towards a good experience for members, we allocated a part of our societal budget to subsidise team lunches once a semester, which helped with bonding in the society. At the end of 2020, when COVID-19 restrictions were reduced, we went for our first in-person team dinner. Nonetheless, what I think makes a bonded team is not the benefits that an organisation provides, but the willingness of each member to commit to the team. The purpose of joining a student organisation has never been for monetary gain or reputational benefits (there really isn’t much). It is not to achieve a certain outcomes, e.g. “I want to execute X number of workshops this year”, but rather to subscribe to a fun and enjoyable experience for everyone. Despite many COVID-19 difficulties, we persisted and forged many strong friendships across the society. 

Workshop Statistics