# Running things on campus

Students' Technical Council, NJACK and Moodboard

IIT Patna

Outside class, most of my time at IIT Patna has gone to three things: keeping the campus apps running, running the AI club's programmes, and putting on a design conference.

They look different, but they're the same job underneath. Something has to ship on a date, a lot of people depend on it, and most of the people doing the work are volunteers with exams.

## Students' Technical Council

As a manager on the Students' Technical Council, I own release management and on-call for the campus apps: Alloc8, OneIITP and the rest of the campus tech, used by 3,000 students. I direct a team of 24 developers, designers and volunteers.

**Who is on call for what**

When an app breaks at 8 in the morning, it breaks for everyone at once.

A campus app has an odd failure pattern. Everyone uses it at the same few moments, like the morning bus or the first lecture, so a bad release doesn't hurt a few people slowly. It hurts all of them at 8 a.m.

So releases follow the same steps every time, written down so they survive the team changing every year.

**How a release goes out**

"Watch" is the step people skip, so it has an owner. For the week after a release, one person reads every crash report and store review, and decides whether we roll back.

The last step matters most in a student team. Half the people who know how something works graduate every year. A release that ships without notes is a problem for next year's team.

## NJACK, the AI club

As a coordinator at NJACK, I ran the club's applied AI programmes and hackathons. We raised ₹1 lakh in sponsorship, drew 800 people to a single event, and trained 500 first-years through Hello World, the club's introduction for new students.

**NJACK in three numbers**

Hello World was the part I cared about most. A first-year's first contact with AI is usually a tutorial that ends in a notebook. We ended every session with something they had built and could show someone.

## Moodboard, the design club

As a coordinator at the Moodboard Design Club, I ran MBDC 1.0, Bihar's largest design conference, with 300+ attendees and speakers from CRED and Tata.

A first conference has no reputation to sell, so the speakers had to be the reason to come. Getting designers from CRED and Tata to a campus in Bihar was the hard part, and the pitch that worked was the audience itself: hundreds of students who wanted to do design work and had rarely met anyone who does.

## What carries over

Running an event and running a release turn out to be close cousins. Both have a date that doesn't move, a checklist someone has to own, and a moment when everyone arrives at once.