Career panel email

Two sample emails you can work from.

Email 1: Longer
This is the email I sent to career panelists, as well as everyone on the Harvard event staff email list. The idea of sending it to the full staff list is so that other staffers have an idea of what to expect. I've made minor changes to improve readability and remove people's names.

Howdy all,

I was taking a moment to review my plans for the career panel, and wanted to share my current thoughts.

Goals

 * Give students a snapshot of how open source is used in industry.


 * Showcase the professional background of each panelist, so students have something to talk about with the speaker, at lunch.


 * Answer questions posed by attendees, or by panelists to each other, to keep things lively.

Guests
I wanted to keep it "small", since we have only half an hour, and the more people we add, the more people we're splitting the time between.

Panelists:


 * A Person
 * Someone Else's Name
 * One More Person
 * Fourth Individual

I intend to serve as a moderator, with the following structure to help achieve the goals.

Structure
First, I'll go around and get panelists to answer these questions as a 30sec-1min self introduction:


 * Your name, your current occupation, and your current employer.


 * How that work relates to open source, briefly.


 * Your relationship to Harvard or the Cambridge area.

What I'd like to do next is ask each of our panelists to say a little bit, one at a time, on the following questions -- try not to spend more than 2-3 minutes talking, so we have time for everyone. After that, let's have more of a conversation among the panelists.

Questions:


 * What advice would you have for if students should participate in open source things in college? Are there particular things that do or don't matter, as things to focus on? (For example, "Definitely start your own open source project rather than contribute to existing ones" or "Don't waste time talking to people on IRC".)


 * Do you have advice on what to do when approaching a project for the first time? Either in terms of code, or in terms of community.

Recall that we'll go straight from this into lunch, so in a way, the point of the career panel is to get students excited about talking to you at lunchtime.

So don't forget to actually talk with them at lunch!

How to prepare
If you want to think about how you'd answer those questions, that'd be great!

To prepare for the discussion part, if you bring a piece of paper and a pencil, then you can take notes so you don't forget your points, and don't forget your responses to the exciting things others on the panel will say!

Meta
As usual, thoughts, arguments, etc. welcome. We have a few days so we can change this plan if that's a good idea.

-- Asheesh.