Team Spotlight: Outreach
Interview with: Felicia Zhang, Outreach Team Lead
Felicia Zhang is a 4th year Computer Engineering and Computer Science major at Northeastern University. She loves making things — and not just with code — but also doing crafts like scrapbooking and sketching! 🎨 Her goal by the end of 2019 is to read 35 books, so you can look to her if you need a good book recommendation. 📚
Meet the Outreach team!
What does the Outreach team do?
In addition to our main HackBeanpot event, the Outreach team puts on events throughout the year to help build a broader tech community with students in the Greater Boston Area. The team puts on small events and workshops with other clubs at schools around Boston. In the spirit of HackBeanpot’s mission, the Outreach team works to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in technology by reaching out and providing resources to students of different backgrounds. We want to promote technology, innovation, and help students form connections with each other!
Tell us about Outreach’s work for 2019.
In 2019, the Outreach team was part of the Social Media team. In collaboration with NUWIT and NUACM, Outreach held an “Intro to Hacking” presentation. Last year’s goals were to encourage the participation of first time or less experienced hackers, as well continue to establish HackBeanpot’s presence as a beginner-friendly and welcoming hackathon space.
What is Outreach’s vision for HackBeanpot 2020?
This is the first year that HackBeanpot has a team solely dedicated to outreach — this means we have more time and resources to focus on outreach work! We don’t usually do a lot of events outside of the annual hackathon itself. This year, our goal is to hold smaller events to help maintain the type of community that HackBeanpot fosters throughout the rest of the year. We want people to gain valuable experiences from these events, whether that be learning a new technology, meeting new people, or creating something new!
Our first event of the year, an “Intro to Hackathons” panel, recently took place in collaboration with Northeastern’s CoSMO (pictured below).
We have a couple of other events in the works for the fall semester! Stay tuned and keep an eye out on our social media for more information 😉
In addition to holding events, Outreach x Social Media have been working on a biweekly newsletter HackBeanNews. Each newsletter features a spotlight from one of our team members, tech events happening around Boston, and of course a good coding meme or two 😈.
What is your favorite part of the Outreach team?
It is really cool to collaborate with different schools and student groups, and I love being able to meet new people! While the outreach team is helping connect students, we also get to meet people by planning these events, which has been really great.
Anything else you want to share?
If your club or organization is interested in putting on an event in collaboration with HackBeanpot please let us know! You can reach us at team@hackbeanpot.com 🙂 And let us know if there are any type of events you would like to see us put on in the future!
