The Warwick economics summit is Europe’s largest student run conference, held where yours truly is current on exchange at. It’s actually quite a big deal – there’s even a Wikipedia article on it! The conference spans 3 days, including a ball with a 3-course meal. The tickets run a steep 50 – 150 GBP (100 – 300 CAD!) and yet they sell out online in minutes. Your boy was hired as a photographer for the event and I got unlimited access throughout the event.
A good portion of attendees to the WES are actually students across the EU. People flew from North America, Asia, Spain, Germany and many other countries. Their ticket price (150GBP) included 2 night’s accommodation at our on-campus conference suites.
The 3-day conference featured prominent European leadership, including Nobel Laureates (James Mirrlees), former prime ministers (Enrico Letta), UN director general (Michael Moller), academics and various dignitaries. The talks were very technical and too dry for my taste.
However, I immensely enjoyed Dr. Sam Potolicchio, a political strategist, talk on leadership. The gist was: we need to start working on complex problems as a society. Finding answers are too simply nowadays with Google search. By training ourselves to think complexly, we develop essential leadership skills. i.e. How much barbershops are there in Chicago? You should develop an intellectual curiosity to attempt to solve it rather than giving up because the answer cannot be determined in 30 seconds. The guy is also extremely charismatic and funny, I’d recommend watching some of his YouTube talks.
The Saturday evening featured a ball from 7pm – 2am. We kicked off the night with a wine reception to get everyone relaxed.
The dinner commenced at 8pm, starting out with some soup, a chicken leg main, and cheesecake dessert. The evening also featured a magician performance and a salsa dance – both were highly entertaining. The evening soon devolved into a nightclub, tapering off at 2am.
Another cool thing this conference did was a “meet the speakers” session. It was a select group of 5 – 8 students who gets 30 minutes in a room with the speakers to talk and network. Conversations were much more intimate, engaging and enriching than the Q&A during the talks.
The conference concluded late Sunday afternoon. Hats off to the 2 coordinators who managed a team of 50 students to execute the conference. I was told they were working with a 30k budget!
