Week 14: Commenting and Social Media

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2017 SIGGRAPH Student Volunteers


Hello fellow students!

I wanted to let you know of an awesome opportunity in volunteering at SIGGRAPH! If you haven’t heard of it before, SIGGRAPH is a 5 day, fun-filled conference that showcases the year's greatest advances in film, animation, real-time rendering, virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, robotics, engineering, and more. And this coming summer, from August 12th - 16th, it’s taking place in Vancouver, Canada. Companies such as Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios, BlueSky, LAIKA, NASA, Autodesk, BioWare, and Foundry, to name a few, attend!
SIGGRAPH has a unique view into the graphics world, and as an animation student, I love to see the innovation and progress happening in our field. (Check out SIGGRAPH in the news here!) I find it exciting and inspiring to see how professionals continue to learn and make new discoveries across multiple levels and fields.

Conference tickets are normally expensive, but there is a special opportunity as a student volunteer to get to see behind the scenes. We work on the conference floor for certain hours and then explore the conference off-shift as all-access attendees! This means that we can go to many of the presentations, screenings, demo reel talks, and special Student Volunteer sessions such as last year's ‘Breakfast with Pixar’.

I volunteered for the first time last year, and wasn’t expecting to fall in love with the conference. But I did. I gained perspective on the industry and on myself from friends, peers, and attendees from around the world. As volunteers, we had each come to SIGGRAPH through different pathways and for different reasons, but I loved to see the community that was created when combining computer graphics and volunteering in the SV office. I have never felt so at home so quickly.

 If you want to check out more about the Student Volunteer program from 2017 SV Chair Munuu, watch this video, or if you're short on time, listen to 2018 SV Chair Emma here! You can also check out some of the recorded sessions from SIGGRAPH 2017 here, including the keynote speech by Disney Legend Floyd Norman!

I cannot say enough about SIGGRAPH and the people I met, so I highly encourage you all to apply as a student volunteer! Beyond  the conference, we keep in touch with each other via a group Facebook page, personal friendships, and college meetups. The conference connections expand far beyond the 5 day event, and are constantly growing, connecting us as individuals and professionals.  

Until next time,

Kat


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