Image credit: Images provided by Juan de Joya
This piece was contributed by Juan de Joya, an ACM SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Conferences volunteer.
I have, like most SIGGRAPH 2024 attendees, spent these past few days fumbling through my recollections of the sessions I attended, the meetings I was privy to, and the hallway conversations I spontaneously found myself in throughout the week. One of the most exhilarating and challenging aspects of our conferences is that, for but a few days in the year, there is so much of everything and everyone in our industry in one location. One minute you could be caught in a heated argument on open-source technologies for production late into the night; the next you can find yourself, double-shot espresso in hand, listening in on early morning Birds of a Feather sessions on how the computer graphics community can work toward visualizing our natural world or reevaluating our environmental impact. It is an eclectic mix of people, interests, philosophies, and backgrounds that are rarely found outside these halls. And the conference week, however fleeting, can leave one with experiences and relationships that are meaningful to one’s professional growth, even if not obvious at first.
In between meetings, I was able to catch Darin Grant’s Keynote, “The Value of Serial Volunteerism”, for Open Source Days 2024 (co-located with SIGGRAPH 2024) early in the week. This was by no means an accident; we had a conversation about the topic the night before and I was challenged to share my thoughts on his presentation. And while I can never promise I will have the most comprehensive notes coming out of the conferences, I listened to this keynote. Then I spent time listening, both to other friends and attendees, about their experiences throughout SIGGRAPH 2024.
Since then, I have been reflecting on my volunteerism and the impact SIGGRAPH has had on me. I find that my relationship to the organization and the community has changed in tandem with where I am in my career. I am no longer a Student Volunteer at my first SIGGRAPH; I traded some of my wide-eyed excitement and immense feelings of inadequacy for an inquisitiveness tempered by my experiences (and now manageable levels of imposter syndrome!) as a working software engineer in computer graphics. The people I used to be intimidated by are now colleagues with whom I can converse, argue, and organize a session with; the conference sessions I could not decipher in the past now only require muscle memory to catch up on.
The author as a Student Volunteer Team Leader at SIGGRAPH 2013 and SIGGRAPH Asia.
Nowadays I find myself on the other end of students’ questions at volunteer lunches and while walking down hallways. These encounters have been a surreal and humbling out-of-body experience — what wisdom do I have to impart to students and young professionals when I am still navigating my own professional journey and growth? At what point did I make the leap from aspiring undergraduate to someone with some answers and advice about the industry? Can students please stop calling me “sir”, and where did this sliver of white hair come from?
All this to say: I wrote this to share some additional thoughts on volunteerism and the meaning and value I have ascribed to my personal experiences. This was inspired by conversations and encounters throughout SIGGRAPH 2024 (including the keynote above) as well as my journey as a volunteer at SIGGRAPH. This is all opinion, so I would caution anyone reading to take my words with a grain of salt and make of these what you will. Feel free argue with me in the next SIGGRAPH hallway we both end up in.
Take Ownership of Your Volunteer Journey
The thesis of Darin’s keynote is that continually volunteering one’s time and energy to support this industry provides one with growth and opportunities far beyond what one will achieve in one’s day job. As such, finding a way to align one’s industry volunteerism with work will empower one’s professional growth in the long term. This was further supported by examples and lessons from his own experience as a decades-long volunteer across different organizations, including but not limited to challenges such as dealing with time commitments, imposter syndrome, and not having a community to lean on when starting out.
I personally appreciate that he shared his story and message. As volunteers, we do not often spend time taking stock of our shared experiences and how they have shaped us. Seeing someone else’s perspective is inspiring; it reminded me how much I have grown in my time as a volunteer for SIGGRAPH, and that none of it has been in vain.
Staying actively engaged in spaces such as SIGGRAPH — let alone volunteering for it — is not easy. Taking initiative as a volunteer and fully investing in that journey requires time and energy on top of one’s day-to-day work. Maintaining sustained motivation and vision for what one is volunteering for and why can be obscured by varying factors, some of which are out of one’s control.
As Posters Chair alongside the SIGGRAPH 2014 conference committee.
It can be especially hard as a younger professional trying to find one’s footing. I personally have had many moments of self-doubt with regards to my role and value when I started volunteering and have often questioned my involvement when there are more experienced and capable professionals who have been in the community for years. Despite appearances, I am also quite the introvert — while I enjoy conversations and step up to participate, I am never one who necessarily wants to be in the center of attention nor am I entirely comfortable in it.
One thing I have learned and has kept me grounded is that it is always important to be able to step outside of myself and recognize the value of my contributions. Volunteering with ACM SIGGRAPH, through the SIGGRAPH conferences, and with other related organizations, conferences, and events are commitments to both to our professional growth as well as to our community — the work we do in these spaces and the relationships we foster with each other as a result is the glue that holds our community together.
It can be easy to discount ourselves and our contributions as insignificant, but this is never true. Regardless of where one is in life and in one’s career, it never hurts to contribute your time and voice to uplift others. Volunteering allows us to connect with our community and make it a better space, so even helping with what people may see as the smallest tasks can make a real difference to oneself and others in the long term, so as long one is willing to take that step and see that journey through.
The author and friends folding posters at Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) 2014.
Always Understand Your Why
Making the best of volunteerism requires interrogating and understanding why one wants to volunteer at any given point in time. What are your goals, values, interests, and can volunteering align with them? Knowing your motivations can help you choose the right projects, set honest and realistic expectations, and stay focused on your purpose. This can also help you say no to activities that might overwhelm you and/or do not align with where you want this experience to take you.
When I started out as the chair of the Practitioner Career Development Committee for ACM SIGGRAPH, the organization, one of my responsibilities was to create career development resources for professionals across different industries. The challenge with such a broad mandate in scope. We could have created mentorship programs, webinars, inspirational fireside chats, summer schools, and on-site programming among other things from the get-go — there was enough excitement and drive to do so. However, our committee established early on that it was important for us to genuinely understand the career journeys of a varying swath of professionals amidst changing industry conditions, what type of industry career development resources would strongly resonate and have lasting relevance, and how we can foster both a sense of community and pathways for participation through our efforts.
As a chair, I believed that this level of general needs assessment was important to make sure our efforts were meaningful to the professionals we served. Personally, I reflected on my own experiences as a student and volunteer looking for work at SIGGRAPH. When I was starting out, I had some aspirations and ideas of what I wanted to do as a profession but lacked perspective on why. It was easy for me to point out and state that I would like to pursue computer graphics in film and games, but I did not stop to question whether a job aligned with who I wanted to be, what I was passionate about, and whether it would set me up for success down the line.
If I were, as the undergraduate Student Volunteer that I was, to start working in rendering as I do now, I would be overwhelmed with choice. Would I want to do low-level driver work, define new graphics APIs, or develop debugging and performance tools? Do I want to be involved in developing bleed-edge deep learning techniques, generate synthetic data and create visualization workflows for digital twins, or tackle performance challenges in network-streamed rendering? To what degree do I prefer to spend a majority of my work hours coding, being involved with product roadmaps, engaging with customers, or supporting my colleagues? How do I prioritize these different goals, manage my bandwidth and work-life balance, and create a professional self-development plan for myself that allows me to get to where I want to go?
To be fair, developing this skill for introspection is something that we can pick up on the job, and I am incredibly grateful for the privileges and opportunities I have had that helped me expand my horizons. But from the varying experiences, conversations and observations I have had, I have found that figuring out what one really wants to do and why is something that we — especially as students and young professionals — rarely make time to ask ourselves. The questions I raised above are some that, even to this day, I continually I ask myself. And while I have, through my volunteerism with SIGGRAPH, luck, and effort, found career paths that have helped me grow as a professional, I recognize that not everyone will have the same opportunities and access as I did.
Being able to ask ourselves what we want to do and why is an important step toward lifelong career self-development; even when there is no firm and final answer, or one only finds out what they do not want to do in the end, it is a process worth undertaking. It is very hard to get an appropriate mentor before knowing what you want to do. It is very hard to identify a good job until you know what you want to do. And a person cannot necessarily have confidence that what they’re doing for their growth is the right thing for them until they know what they want to do.
This became the strongest motivation for the Practitioner Career Development Committee and remains my motivation for wanting to volunteer. Outside of my own self-development through volunteerism, I believe that we should encourage people to proactively think about their professional journeys and give them the space, resources, and tools to have ownership of their growth. I believe this to be particularly important for the next generation of computing professionals who are navigating their careers amidst a changing industry — how can we help them finding their footing, enable them to succeed, and give them a sense that they belong in our community? Personally speaking, how can I pay forward the kindness others have shared with me when I started out, and how can I make that count?
Knowing why you are volunteering matters. Understanding your motivations can serve as your north star toward making decisions that not only help you but also others. Having a passion for what you’re doing can help you focus on what matters most to you and will take you farther than you expect on your volunteer journey.
Volunteering for the SIGGRAPH 2023 50th Anniversary Fast Backwards and Practitioner Sessions.
Learning to Evolve as You Go Along
At the time of writing this, I was poking Darin’s brain a bit further over the phone. We talked a bit about where we came from, our varying career choices, and I maybe divulged a bit too much about my retirement plans (I’m currently leaning toward becoming an eccentric hermit hiding in a mountain where I build weird tech things, clearly the way of all great engineers!).
One topic that came up was the changing nature of volunteerism and what it means for the volunteer at different points in their life. When he was volunteering for SIGGRAPH 2022, Darin had approached a friend to join the conference committee for a position he thought would be a great fit. While his friend was interested in what the role was trying to achieve, he declined being involved. While he felt easy to say yes to a lot of opportunities, he was also at a point in his life where he would only want to commit to things that he can say “hell, yes!” to.
Identifying why we volunteer helps us understand what we want to do with the experience. Subsequently, it is also important to continually evaluate how we want to volunteer and balance that out with other things in our lives. How much time can you realistically devote to volunteering, without compromising your work, health, or personal life? How do you recharge your batteries and take care of yourself?
A priority in finding balance as a volunteer is to consider the amount of time and energy a role will require. This is something that I now think about often. When I was younger, it was easier to say yes and make time for SIGGRAPH activities — if anything, I highly encourage people to make the best of each volunteer opportunity they can contribute to. But as I continue to grow in my career and in my personal life, I have become more mindful about how I can make the most impact with what I am able to contribute. As an example, I have no regrets about stepping away from being a chair for ACM SIGGRAPH — it comes at a time when I can focus on my personal growth, which includes having more bandwidth to grow at work, to contribute toward environmental causes, to get married, and to think about the next stages of my life. None of this means I will ever stop volunteering; rather, what I want to commit to is changing to match my current life goals.
Volunteer roles, no matter how exciting, should not be fulfilled at the expense of our personal health, relationships, education, work, and/or general happiness. Being an effective volunteer means being honest with oneself — it can help us prevent burnout and enjoy our volunteer experiences.
It might be obvious, but it is important to point out that you do not work in isolation as a volunteer — you do not have to do everything by yourself. You can always seek support from various sources, such as family, friends, mentors, and other volunteers who may have similar goals, challenges, and insights. You can ask for advice, feedback, or encouragement, and offer the same to others. That is the spirit of being involved in a volunteer community such as SIGGRAPH.
Spending time with fellow volunteers (and great people!) who have supported my growth at SIGGRAPH.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Volunteering is not always going to be predictable or smooth. Sometimes things may change, go wrong, or get delayed for a variety of reasons. But it is an incredible learning experience that allows one to gain professional experience and develop valuable connections.
I would like to end this post with one final piece of advice: The next time you participate in a SIGGRAPH activity, whether it is at the conferences, your local chapter, or through our specialized and/or co-located events, please do the following:
Take notes. Have clandestine and meaningful conversations. Argue passionately but listen carefully to others. Do not hesitate to reach out and ask questions. Make acquaintances, meet future colleagues, and cultivate lifelong friendships. Think about where you want to be, what you want to do, and why. Find ways to share and give back to the community — it will not go unrecognized.
Some lifelong friends from SIGGRAPH.
Volunteering at SIGGRAPH is one of the best experiences of my life. It could be the same for you if choose to pursue it. Just remember that what you get out of these experiences is what you make it, so make the best of these whenever you can.
Juan de Joya is a software developer engineer for the Developer Support Program at Autodesk, specializing in support for the Arnold renderer. He has worked on various areas in computer graphics for DigitalFish at Oculus and Google ATAP, Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, the Visual Computing Lab of the University of California, Berkeley, and on AI for Good initiatives at the International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency on information and communication technologies. Juan has served as an ACM SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH volunteer since 2012, and is the outgoing chair of the Practitioner Career Development Committee for the organization and a member of the Practitioner Board of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
