In November 2019, I conducted my 2nd paid workshop. It was an excellent experience. I spent months planning how I can help the local community of Civil Engineers here in Pakistan. I’m quite passionate about structural & interior designing — so as you can imagine AutoCAD is one of my favorite tools.

In this workshop, I helped engineers learn the basics of AutoCAD along with some tips and tricks that I’ve had picked up along the way. I won’t lie, teaching people is hard — add to that my second ever technical hands-on workshop. I’m a proud survivor though, everyone said it went well. So, I’ll just take it.

🏗️ Workshop Particulars

My family is filled with engineers. My father’s a Civil Engineer, so I opted Civil for engineering. Five semesters in, I already know that Civil is the best choice of career for me. But at the same time, I wanted to start my own startup. For that, I started with AutoCAD and learned quite a bit.

So, this workshop was at the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. My audience substantially comprised of civil engineering students. Whether they were absolute beginners or have had some experience with AutoCAD — I made sure there was something for everyone.

👷‍♀️ Talk + Hands-on Learning

I started this workshop in sort of a networking meetup style — with a brief introduction about myself and then everyone else. Next up, I explained the fundamental understanding of AutoCAD. How it plays an important role in this type of engineering field. That was it. I was giving my talk in a technical setting. Scared to my core, I don’t know what would happen next. I hope that’s normal.

🤣While maintaining an entertaining atmosphere by cracking silly jokes and puns, (not all technical things need to be boring, you know) I also conducted a hands-on workshop for CAD skills. Making money on the side with this is a pretty feasible career move, especially for the females. With the overview of basic commands, we all ended up designing a simple map. That brought the point home.

💻 Google Community

This workshop was more special to me as it was held under a Google Community-Developer Student Club (DSC) UET. Special thanks to Saad, one of the 42 DSC leads from Pakistan, who helped a lot in making this workshop successful.

⁉️ Q/A Session

Consider this. Meetups are organized with two thoughts in mind; one is to share new stuff with everyone. The other purpose is to interact and connect with like-minded engineers. Many meetups may cover the first objective, but the second one is even more important. At least for me, it is.

This meetup included an interactive network discussion and Q & A session. Some of the attendees approached me after the talk to ask questions and discuss ideas. At the end of the day, it felt like a bunch of friends hanging out, talking nerd stuff.

🍕 Refreshments & Stuff

I know it was not much, but I made an effort to contribute part of what I had charged for this paid-workshop (it’s it was a paid workshop, did I forget to mention that?) back in the form of refreshments served. The rest of it went to managing, printing, hosting, and software licensing.

  • 📦 Topic: AutoCAD Basics & Fundamentals
  • ⏰ Starting Time: 12 pm
  • 📅 DATE: 7th, November 2019
  • 🏛️ Venue: UET Lahore, PK.

📸 Moments Captured

I am confident that this went very well. Otherwise, I’d hoped to completely forget what I was going to say the moment I step in front of everyone. Imposter syndrome had hit hard, what’s my name I thought, and what in the heck was I thinking planning a workshop at this age.

I’d say that my family, especially my elder brothers, sisters, and my friends were quite supportive. They made me survive this ordeal. Now I am hooked, I’ll be doing this more and more often. Teaching is fun, especially the part when you get to see someone’s Aha moment!

— Since we’re talking about moments, here’re a couple of them captured by Ezzah and Saad. Thanks for everything folks.