The conference

Ok, so this week I was helping at International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM), here at LTU.

So what exactly was I doing? Well first two days I was mainly at the reception helping with registration of newly arrives and showing them around. I was also allowed to go to listen to whichever presentation I wanted and of course all the food and drinks were free for us.

I’ve managed to listen to keynote presentation by Google and I think it was really good. He showed some nice applications we’ll be able to see in near future and of course didn’t forget to show us all the new Google toys aka Nexus 5, Google glasses etc…

For each day of conference we got a coupons that covered all expenses in central restaurant, for lunch. Almost all volunteers (students) were finally able to try the most expensive dish from the menu, with all the extra drinks and stuff (which normally costs around 10€). I think this was the first time since I came here in Lulea that I had pork and some other kinds of meat. Usually I only eat fish or chicken since other kinds cost more than 30€/ kg (and you can’t buy less than 1kg).

Here in Sweden they have a tradition of having so called “Fika” every few hours. Hm how could I explain this? It’s something similar to English Tea (time) though it can happen any time of the day. So every 1.5h of conference we got Fika, which included cakes, drinks, sandwiches, cookies, etc…

So despite being volunteer and not getting paid, I saved around 100€ in this week on food and drinks alone (since I didn’t eat/buy anything at home), and probably gained few kg (of winter isolation 😀 ).

We also got invited to welcoming event in 4* hotel downtown. Needless to say it was awesome.

Overall it was really great experience and I’m happy I’ve been given an opportunity to be involved. I’ve been able to listen to some very good presentations, meet and talked with a lot of new people including presenters. And lastly if I’m not mistaken we are going to get recommendation letter from professor next week. All in all it was great!