Rafid Dewan

My first opportunity I grabbed was IEEE SPAC 2018. It all started at Expo Carleton, which was a day during orientation week where all the clubs present themselves at individual booths. I signed up for this hi-tech engineering club's newsletter. The club was called IEEE Carleton. One day, during the second week of my first year, I received an email from the IEEE Carleton Office Director that they were looking for organizers to help with this big networking event they host every year. The email mentioned that there was a meeting to be held for orientation that night. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity for me to get my name out there and make connections with amazing companies! Although... I've never organized an event in my life...
I headed to the meeting, and I remember very fondly, the room was very dark with only a dim lamp-light above. I was nervous at first, as many other individuals were much older than I was. During the introduction, I noticed many of them were nervous too. Questions kept coming up of what we wanted to do for the event this year. No one said anything. I decided if I want to make an impact and lead the conversation by example, I needed to put my hand up, so I did. Naturally, it was nerve-wracking, so I stammered a bit. I was only a freshman, but people applauded my suggestion and said it was a really good idea! After that, others that were quite started raising their hands too.
I volunteered to work on the patronage team because it was an excellent opportunity for me to make connections with various professionals. My job was to email companies and request for their patronage. From there on, for the first time in my life, I met some amazing mentors and role models I look up to this day. Linda Tang was the Patronage Lead at that time and Dharina Hanumunthadu was the event lead. It was also Dharina's first time on the SPAC team too. Both demonstrated pure leadership and organization skills when managing the event. I looked up to both and wanted to be great leaders, just like both of them. I was amazed that the first role models I ever had (and in STEM) were both women (in a good way of course). I am extremely proud of that.
Closer to the event, we had to finalize a couple of things, such as choosing a Master of Ceremonies (MC). When Dharina asked who wants to be the MC of IEEE SPAC 2018, I put my hand up. Then, I requested Linda to put her hand up too because I was comfortable talking to her most of the time. The whole team vouched for us and I was so happy and humbled I got to be one of the hosts for this amazing event. I remembered I practiced the script 20 times right before the event.
At the start of the event, I was nervous as over 200 people were laying their eyes on me, I had butterflies in my stomach. Linda seemed a bit more composed than I was. I also pointed in the wrong direction when I mentioned where the emergency exits and bathrooms were. We had A/V issues as well and I knew already it was going to be a looooooooong night.
Over time, I got comfortable talking in front of everyone. I started to make quirky jokes and was perfectly in sync with Linda. We strolled through the entire event and received huge applause once it was over.
Many opportunities came to me soon afterwards. I remember when I went to the cash bar alone to grab a glass of ginger ale (I don't drink alcohol as I'm Muslim), a recruiter came up beside me and asked for two beers. He handed one over to me and said, "I know you are underage, but here have this you did amazing." I stared at the drink he gave me. I was speechless. I told him I was very flattered and those words meant a lot to me, but I politely declined the drink. He mentioned that I had a bright future ahead of me. I then went to go see my teammates, and the IEEE Carleton Chair, Irusha Vidanamadura, came up to me, put his nametag around me, and said, "You were the best MC I have ever seen. I see an amazing leader in you; you will go really far in life, trust me." Then we posed for a picture together (see gallery). I was so happy to hear that because I felt like I'm now finally playing to my strengths.
It's situations like these you feel fulfilled and accomplished something in life after thinking you are useless and not worthy for so long. This might be the longest passage, but it's the most memorable one and will always be a part of me. I wanted to give back to the community of something it gave me, the confidence and leadership. So I decided to aim higher to even volunteer for more positions. The remaining passages are going to be much shorter than this one, as this one was the most meaningful story for me.

After SPAC, I met a guy whose name was Federico Naranjo-Bellina, everyone calls him Rico for short. Rico and I first met at SPAC, and he said I did a good job. We got to know each other better at this CUSA leadership conference called SOAR. Rico was an exec at IEEE, and he was the only one I knew who went to that event. So he tagged along with me. My friends were excited about cuHacking which was supposed to happen in February. If you're wondering what cuHacking is, it's a large-scale MLH hackathon that happens every year, the first one in Ottawa. Almost all the first-year software engineering students in my year were excited and wondering if they can get in. I told Rico about it, and surprisingly, he was one of the directors of logistics in the team. Rico convinced me to join the team since he said I'll be in anyways due to the fact of being an organizer. Before I knew it, I had met my lifelong mentor and role model. I didn't know I needed it, but it was the best thing I had coming out of this event.
There were two leads for cuHacking, one was Eliza Kazan, and the other was Taylor Abraham. They were both really smart and successful people. Eliza was doing an internship at Shopify and Taylor was doing one at Kinaxis at the time. They both told me amazing stories about their work experience and got me excited for co-op whenever I finish my second year. I gained much knowledge of big tech industries through both of them. Eliza had tasked me to budget and manage the food at the event.
The event itself was really fun! However, I witnessed some organization downfalls, I learned about how important it is to support each other than demotivate and blame each other in a team. I also learned the value of organization and documentation. I felt bad for both Taylor and Eliza since the predecessors for the event hadn't properly documented it. I've even witnessed sponsors falling out from the event because of the fact the event was shifted from February to March on Easter Weekend due to poor logistical organization. uOttaHack, on the other hand, was just starting up and reached 500 student attendees. It was a huge success. Where were we at Carleton vs. where is uOttawa. However, that all changed within a year. I will get to that in a bit...

Irusha recommended for me to run for a position on the IEEE Carleton executive team. After the efforts from SPAC and cuHacking I put in, he was impressed and wanted to push me into more event management/leadership type positions. I ran to be the social director on the IEEE Carleton executive team. Thankfully, I was elected to hold that position.
Throughout my time as an executive. I participated in informal meetings with votes and lots of discussions. There were so many intelligent people and great leaders amongst the executives. I learned a lot from being corrected at meetings and understood what team leadership is all about. Being in a team is not just working for an individual goal; it's working for a common goal with other team members while enjoying the journey you are on.
Some of the neat things I got to do as social director was attending most of the workshops IEEE Carleton hosts and taking photographs to capture the moments. I was also in charge of updating the social media pages as well as organizing social events.
I organized IEEE Escape Rooms for executive bonding. To organizing a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate tournament. To organizing and Aladdin movie night. To organizing a trivia night event. To organizing our annual IEEE Day celebration. To even organizing an IEEE bubble tea hangout event with uOttawa, which happened to be on the day of the tornado! Long story short, there was a blackout, people still went, and we played pool and had bubble tea in the dark.

Rico was pronounced co-lead with my old elementary school friend, Alexandra Liaskovski. I promoted to be the Director of Logistics, leading a team of eight engineering and computer science students for this event.
There were many hurdles during cuHacking 2019. We faced a major sponsorship crisis since we lost the trust of many of our sponsors from the letdown of cuHacking 2018. I believe we received $15 000 less compared to the previous year. The budget was very tight as we only raised approximately $21 000 from sponsorship and we are running a 24-hour hackathon with 470+ attendees expected to show up. This was even more difficult because Conference Services made all the Carleton University faculty and clubs to comply with using the Carleton Dining Services, and not take outside catering. Doing so will immediately take down our event.
Most of the duration of the planning for this event was stressful. I was able to bring the most out of my team members and ensure they are enthusiastic and want to contribute to the team. I enjoyed running meetings, booking the venue and merchandise, planning the activities for the event, and making meaningful connections with my team members.
It was a difficult time when cuHacking 2019 did happen. There was no other lead to handle the day of logistics as it was all on my shoulders. I also had around three assignments and two midterms the night before cuHacking 2019. Also, did I ever mention to tell you that I was chased by campus security during that night? It's an interesting story that I love to tell in person.
The event went much smoother than the year before, and we received 383 students and 100 professionals showing up. The sponsors were much happy and regained confidence with cuHacking once again. uOttaHack also had around 400 students attending their hackathon, so comparatively, we did well after the downfall from the previous year.
Rico was someone who I take all my leadership advice from during the time I was starting to be a director. He noticed I was exhausted and tired, so he led from the front and handled organizing the demos and judging. Rico had led this team in such a way, despite having those difficult obstacles. Him and Alexa led this team to overcome them. Most importantly, he taught me organizational leadership, which to me, was the most valuable skill I learned in my life thus far.
After the event, we divided up the logistics team to three departments. Operations, Hacker Experience, and Logistics. Logistics focuses more on pre-planning items such as venue and food. While Operations focuses on communication with various university departments and teams within the organizing committee. Lastly, Hacker Experience, which focuses on pure day-of activities and events. The Hacker Experience team is essential to how the entire event is executed. I developed handbooks for Hacker Experience and Logistics at the time, while Rico did the one for operations. Rico continued to be the lead of cuHacking next year and it ended up a huge success. Over 600 students had attended for cuHacking 2020. The new leads of the departments that I did the onboarding presentation for thanked me since that helped them organize everything. They also used the documentation I provided to ensure mistakes weren't repeated, which include things such as handbooks, Gantt Charts, Trello Cards, and spreadsheets.

So, In concurrent with being the Social Director for IEEE Carleton, Director of Logistics for cuHacking, I was also allowed to be the patronage lead for SPAC 2019. My task was to manage a team of five to six engineering students and fund the event. The SPAC team was able to gain over $22 000 for patronage which was a budget increase of $10 000 from the previous year.
While the patronage was successful, the committee overall wasn't as pleasant of an experience. People seemed to do SPAC for themselves to boost their portfolio rather than for the cause and the event. To be frank, at the time, I was one of them. I fell victim in the trap of overconfidence and felt like I was the Patronage Lead just to make myself look good that under my leadership, there was a gain in profits. I realized that is not what defines leadership. Leadership isn't about accomplishments; it's about motivating others to do work and raising your hand to a challenge that you put upon yourself.
SPAC 2019 ended up in a huge success as it was the biggest SPAC in its history, holding up to 330 guests total for a networking dinner.

Entering my final years of university, I felt it was time for me to enter more mature roles. After realizing where my morals were when I volunteered was wrong, I wanted to change that. I wanted to eliminate the toxic environment from last year and incorporate a new one. I was inaugurated for SPAC Lead on May 9, 2019, with my uOttawa co-lead, Alizeh. Using the past few years of experience, I gained, I felt it was finally time to give back to the event that has given me so much and started me off on this involvement journey.
During the summer, Alizeh and I ran about three meetings to understand the setup and how to run the event this year. We shared our goals and ambitions for the event and what we want to make out of it. We discussed how we should make applications because of the toxicity that was in the team last year. We want to make SPAC a professional environment where people feel comfortable and feel like they belong somewhere. Despite SPAC being an interbranch student event (making it very difficult for everyone in getting to know each other), that was the vision we had for our committee.
We had a list of interview questions to test soft skills ready. We marketed our applications appropriately using the right social media platforms and knowing what times to best post. We wanted to help our future team members to gain the experience and feedback of a professional application-interview process. So that when they go for applying for jobs, they will be ready to tackle soft questions.
We ran two rounds of interviews. We gathered the Patronage Leads, Logistics Leads, and WebMaster within the first round. Then in the second round, we gathered Marketing Leads, Marketing Team Members, Graphics Lead, Graphics Designers, and day-of volunteers! In total, we had around 40 applications, with 34 of them becoming team members on the SPAC team.
We asked the question, "Why do you wanna be a part of the SPAC Committee?" Why may you ask? People tend to talk about themselves and how they are good for the position. However, what I'm trying to teach the interviewees is that you should especially talk about why you want to be part of a community and make an impact on others. We ran an annual general onboarding meeting as well to showcase our values, who we are, and why we do SPAC. That way people know we are doing it for a cause and common goal even after the interview.
The event itself had a lot of unfortunate outcomes. Many companies were not spending their budgets on recruitment events in fear of a recession occurring. The fallout of companies affected SPAC especially, as we lost about 8-10 companies who were patrons with us last year. We were in similar shoes of cuHacking 2019 with a very restricted budget. The one thing I have to admit that I did poorly was managing team stress at the time. It didn't occur to me at the time that my stress was projecting on others, which was not healthy management. One of my team members told me to take a step back, take a breather, and talk to the patronage team who felt very pressured at the time. I talked to each one of the patronage leads and apologized to them for making them feel stressed.
What I did to make this up to them is during our usual meeting, both Alizeh and I addressed all the concerns and assured that the entire team that we will be fine for the budget as we are planning a contingency budget. We even gave shout outs to every single department lead and mentioned the work they have done and that both Alizeh and myself are so proud of them. We made it up by proposing that the next meeting will only be half its length; the rest of the time, we will do professional headshots and play board games. This eased the stress of team members quite a lot and got them motivated to do work again.
We had unfortunate issues such as the IT guy at the venue took a day off, and there were several A/V complications. We couldn't sell tickets at the door for half an hour since the treasurer wasn't there. Some of the nametags were mysteriously gone for some reason too... However, we still made it one of the most memorable events. Cisco, our patron partner, was very satisfied, and the attendees were content too. I ensured to document all the things that both Alizeh and I have done in a 50-page handbook. That way, future SPAC Leads have all the information they need during onboarding and know what to expect and when to delegate a task. They can focus on other aspects growing the event or making the SPAC team a family.

I decided to be secretary of the IEEE Carleton executive team as it's an officer's position. The officers at the branch are considered the faces of IEEE Carleton. I chose to run for secretary because I wanted to improve the documentation and change the meetings to an agile stand-up approach. I was also able to organize the file structure of the organization, which was very disorganized with many of the files inside the wrong folders. It was confusing for anyone to navigate through. The file structure is now completely organized and is very easy to maintain now.
The most important aspect of me being an officer was that I could help grow the future officers and leaders of the branch. The position allowed me to help troubleshoot problems by giving valuable advice from my experience or point them in the right direction towards the right contact.

Our product was called HackrTrackr. How it essentially works is that you post a problem that appears on the newsfeed with several other users' problems. The problems are distinguished between troubleshooting and working on side projects. A programming student will try to match with you, and you can observe their ratings out of five stars. Once you accept the match, you can work with him/her. Once he/she provides the service, you must give them a rating (kind of like an Airbnb type of business).
Since this is a cross-platform application, we were going to use our tech stack to be React Native. We were going to use Firebase as our database to store all the data and user information. We'd also use Google Maps API so that way you can find people nearby who are available to help troubleshoot problems. We were also planning on using TensorFlow to find the best suggestions to freelancers which client job they should do next. HackeTrackr will help improve productivity as users won't be stuck on just plain StackOverFlow, and not know what's going on. The service will even help students or other future developers gain experience and skills since they will have experience reading other people's code while working face to face. Freelancers can show these ratings and reviews to companies and companies can see the types of problems they solved and the types of projects they collaborated with other people. Giving a much larger advantage than other recruiting platforms such as LinkedIn and Devpost.
There were around 8-10 other groups, and the judging for the pitches was done by a software engineering manager at Google and the VP Innovation of Invest Ottawa. Overall, we came awarded second place.

It was an honour to winning an award for my volunteer efforts in the engineering community! I truly love doing things outside the classroom and making a real-world impact on people's lives. My volunteering for IEEE Carleton, IEEE SPAC, cuHacking, and other initiatives was not just a stepping stone for my dreams but a journey that I so deeply fell in love with and enjoyed. I won the award for my efforts in cuHacking, IEEE SPAC, IEEE Carleton, and other student clubs with high profile impact. Click on this article if you would like to see the journal/interview conducted.

It utilizes an ML algorithm (a LinearClassifier) from the TensorFlow library to measure the current deal of the bed to other deals and produces a rating out of five stars. The website was elegantly designed using React.JS by utilizing prototyping tools such as Figma. Our goal was to have a beautiful and elegant app with a comfortable user experience. Demos were judged by judges by professionals and interns from Kinaxis, Microsoft, Ciena, Martello, and RBC.

I was nominated this year after leading a successful year of IEEE SPAC 2020. I was also recognized for my commitments and mentorship for other fellow execs who were new to the executive committee at IEEE Carleton and IEEE SPAC.