One should join a conference organising committee for two reasons: the practical experience and the personal journey. If there is one thing that the Researching our Futures conference has taught us all is that we should use our time at university wisely and develop our skills. Getting involved in event management is definitely one of the best opportunities to push ourselves to our limits, which I suggest you with all my heart. But my advice goes further: before you do, make a list of all the things you do well and all the things you don’t. If I had given this exercise a try myself, the ‘this scares me’ points would have without a doubt exceeded the ‘I am fine with this’ ones. Then, once your event is over, and after you have had some rest, please make another list. I am sure you would not just find yourselves in front of a more positive evaluation, but of a series of notes giving yourselves suggestions for improvement. Experience is not making a task easier and easier, it actually is growing awareness, retrospection, evaluation, it is understanding what went wrong and finding a way to fix it, managing and surviving crises, changing your plans and attitudes. And these are essentials skills in research.
When I joined the RoF committee, I was enthusiastic about the possibility to ‘create’ and ‘shape’ a new event, the first of this kind. We had to ask ourselves what the university wanted from us ‘inexperienced’ students, what the students wanted from the university, what this all meant and how to make it happen. It was scary at first, it took us a long time, but we learned a lot on the way. But only now I realise, thinking back on my experience and on the RoF speakers’ advice: is this not what researchers do? To tackle problems and solve them? Aren’t researchers entrepreneurial, analytic and creative? Yes, they are. Yes, we are. Yes, you are. And you have the right skills to make anything happen.