Volunteering for the Assocation of Computational Heresy and CMU's School of Computer Science: November 2011 to present Every year around April Fool's Day the Association for Computational Heresy holds a one-day long academic conference called SIGBOVIK (Special Interest Group: Bovik). The story behind the conference is that Harry Q. Bovik (a fictional computer science researcher) has studied many fantastical and silly fields in computer science and we are honoring his research by presenting papers of our own.

The academic conference involves reaching out to graduate (and some undergraduate) students in order to get paper submissions for the book of papers (the proceedings) and presentation submissions for the actual conference. Students work on their papers and presentations from the end of the fall semester until late April. Some of these papers and presentations involve real research methods, and not all of them are within the field of computer science, but most of them are silly, tongue-in-cheek, or mocking of the academic process.

My role as a conference organizer has been the main event planner and coordinator. I organize staff meetings and we keep track of what needs to be done. This involves advertising for the event, hosting brainstorming sessions for the students interested in participating, dealing with paper/presentation submissions, managing a budget for food and souvenirs for attendees, reserving a room and microphone on campus for the event, and day-of coordination.