ACM at UTD Leadership

ACM at UTD is one of the largest student organizations on campus, with 30 officers comprised of 4 teams and hundreds of members. ACM's mission is to build a better engineering community for everyone.

There’s a lot of cool stuff going on and I’ll share what I’ve learned from my friend and former ACM president, Izu as well as what I’ve picked up and observed during my time as VP and President of ACM. I was able to lead the club as VP and President from the fall of 2015 to the spring of 2017.

The ACM has a few different divisions:

1. ACM Industry hosts industry talks where companies like Google, StateFarm, and local startups come share what they do and how students can get into the industry.
2. ACM also hosts HackUTD, the largest university Hackathon in North Texas, where students from around the nation come to UTD to code, build, and create awesome things. I had the chance to help lead HackUTD’16 and ‘17.
3. ACM Projects is where freshman and sophomores learn about software engineering principles and how to work in teams while coming out with a cool project. I helped launch this division.
4. ACM Labs is where experienced student developers, designers, and project managers build software that solve problems in the UTD community. I also helped launch this.
5. ACM Education is a learning community led by student tutors for advanced courses that usually aren’t covered by the school’s tutoring services.

I’ve learned a lot about leadership, the differences between it and management, and ways to be a leader. Leadership is about inspiring others and working with them to achieve something incredible, bigger and better than my individual self. Management is more about getting things done and execution. A leader should definitely be able to manage, but must also be able to bring that “it” factor to the table.

Here are a few things I’ve learned are important:

• Removing feelings of authority and hierarchy
• Leading by example
• Taking time to know and befriend officers
• Valuing everyone’s input and feedback

I’ve realized that these are ways to build a unique culture where everyone can be themselves, help themselves succeed, and also contribute to ACM’s goal. At ACM, our culture is casual yet structured, fun but hardworking, and transparent but kind. We trust each other to do what we need to, get things done, and constantly find new ways to do things even better.

Maintaining a collaborative and exiting culture is key to continuing the work ACM is doing. We take recruiting and interviewing potential officers very seriously because that's where our future is. We have online applications and then an intervie. We encourage all of our Directors to give feedback on who they think would be a good fit, as well as have relevant Directors along with the President and Vice President present at interviews.

We keep a few things in mind with our applications:

• Our online application allows us to see which candidates spent time filling out the application
• The application lets us see what skills and leadership experience they have
• We don’t try to match an application to an open position, but look for passionate people.
• We can’t tell everything from just the application, so our Directors give feedback on applications and we try to interview as many applicants as possible.

We want the interview to be a good representation of the ACM brand, as well as have a chance to see if the candidates would be a good culture fit. The interviews are pretty casual; they’re just the President, VP, and relevant Director (if necessary) asking the candidates some questions and chatting in an open area.

The interview questions are designed to help us understand why a candidate would be a good fit on a team, what interests they have, and why they want to be a part of ACM. After interviewing each candidate, we discuss the pros and cons, and record what open position we think they would be able to fill based on their experience and interests.

After deciding which candidates we like, we send them acceptances. On-boarding is a really important part of the hiring process because this where we can set the tone and expose the new officer to ACM.

We have a quick on-boarding meeting with new officers to:

• Familiarize them with ACM's structure
• Give them a more detailed breakdown of their position
• Go over basic guidelines such as meeting attendance and potluck (every week officers bring food to meetings)
• Offer personal advice on how to be a good officer and leader. We want everyone in ACM to be awesome.

At ACM, we want and expect officers to take their position and make it their own. Listed responsibilities are the bare minimum, and innovation is a huge part of how ACM continues to get even better. We also encourage officers to speak up and share their ideas for how their position could be done better and then provide them the means to go ahead and implement those improvements.

While officers have their own list of responsibilities to uphold, there are also certain things ACM needs to give officers.

Here's what ACM provides officers:

• A collaborative and engaging culture so officers have the right environment to do incredible things.
• Listening to everyone’s ideas and feedback.
• Providing direction when an officer has a rough idea and would like to take it further.
• Removing levels of authority from interactions. We strive to make our Directors friends that simply have more responsibility than their committees rather than a boss.
• Allow officers to help other officers with some of their duties or take on some other project if it’s something they care about.
• Swag, since everyone loves swag.

Since I’ve joined ACM, it’s grown from just an ACM team with a few extra officers for HackUTD to a full-blown organization with 30 officers, 4–5 divisions that do some cool things. As I’ve seen and helped ACM expand, I’ve learned that one important thing that comes up within any organization is the ability to maintain the quality of whatever we are providing to students as we grow. An example of that is when ACM Projects first started, we decided to go with a someone who has more management and people skills versus someone who was more creative to lead Projects. This is because Projects has a concrete vision, but is still new so the priority is to get projects off the ground.

We don’t necessarily grow as a strategy, but rather do so out of an organic understanding of how we can make the engineering community even better. For example, getting internships in tech is becoming more competitive and they require project and teamwork experience. However, freshman and sophomore students don’t get that in their classes. An officer had an idea to address that problem through student-led group software engineering projects organized and facilitated by ACM. This became ACM Projects.

Another example of expanding is the new officer positions that come up as a need of certain functions. For example, as the team started to grow rapidly, we needed a Director of Communications to keep track of all officers contact information, send out internal announcements across the organization, and manage recruiting communications. Previously, this was done by Izu and myself, but as things got bigger, we needed more help.

ACM Labs was a new division we launched recently, so I wanted to share some of the steps we took to build Labs.

The breakdown:

• Clearly define the goal: to engage students to work together to create apps that solve problems in the UTD community.
• Understand why we wanted that goal: as a club that’s focused on enhancing the engineering experience for students outside of class, having students work together on cool projects that are meaningful does that.
• Figure out how Labs would play into the existing ACM infrastructure internally: finances, branding, recruiting, leadership for Labs, website, etc.
• Decide how to source projects for students to work on.
• Understand what qualities we needed in student developers, designers, and project managers that would be working on these projects.
• Create a roadmap for setting up the organizational infrastructure for Labs, recruiting students, and staffing projects.
• Launching ACM Labs!

Another really important part of leading an organization is balancing vision and execution. Vision is keeping in mind ACM’s mission and finding ways ACM can further that mission. Execution is more about making sure everything across ACM is running smoothly. It’s important to balance the two because it sort of goes back to scalable expansion: we want to continue enhancing that experience outside the classroom for students, but at the same time want to make sure it’s well done.

Recently, ACM has gone through a lot of the vision part, by quickly expanding and launching two new divisions (ACM Projects and Labs), so my focus was to hold down the fort so to speak, so that all of ACM can continue to operate at a high level. Of course, while focusing on execution, we don’t want to limit ideas on how ACM can be better. It’s all about balance so that ACM is accomplishing its mission in the best way possible.

One huge way that I believe ACM has been successful is the culture that we've built from the frienships and bonds that are formed. Everyone on ACM is on really good terms, is friends with each other, and is referred to as "fam". It's awesome to be a part of something like that while being able to do what we do. It adds an element of delight and excitement to ACM, and makes it a place where we can do something bigger, together.

Visit our website here to see what we've been up to, and thanks for reading!