Post by Vashisht Pawa

TMU Tech Week started with me on Instagram 🤳🏽 Not something I expected. Alongside my BYTE colleagues Cérine Djerouni and Areej Shariq, I had the chance to take over the Ted Rogers Students'​ Society Instagram account, the student-led organization representing the Ted Rogers School of Management - Toronto Metropolitan University, with a reach of over 10,000 followers. We used the takeover to talk about TMU Tech Week; sharing what we had been building behind the scenes and answering questions from students in real time. BYTE, the group behind TTW, is largely made up of Computer Science and Computer Engineering students, so as a TRSM student myself, that moment felt especially meaningful. It was the first time I was speaking directly to students from my own faculty about something I had helped build from the ground up. Thank you to the TRSS team for the timeslot and for trusting us with their platform to share what we’ve been building! But then a couple days passed, and so came TTW’s Opening Ceremony. Months of planning suddenly turned into a room full of students, professionals, conversations, and energy that you can’t really manufacture. You either build it right, or you don’t. What people see at an event is the stage, the speakers, the networking. What they don’t see is the framework underneath it ⚙️ As Vice President of Finance @ BYTE, it had been mostly smooth sailing up until this point, but TMU Tech Week was a different beast to tame. It was ambitious, unconventional, and far larger in scale than anything we had executed before. 💸 Forecasting costs without historical data. 💸 Securing funding and making sure we stayed aligned with approvals. 💸 Building buffers into the schedule. 💸 Making sure ambition didn’t outpace reality. When you’re organizing something for the first time, there’s no template to fall back on. You’re estimating. Adjusting. Stress-testing assumptions. Hoping the systems you built will hold when the room fills up. When the fateful day came and the Opening Ceremony unfolded smoothly, I could finally take a breath of relief. No operational gaps, no budget overruns, no chaos behind the scenes. Just execution. That’s when it clicked. The infrastructure we built from scratch was solid. TMU Tech Week wasn’t just an idea anymore. It was something tangible. Something executed responsibly. Something built from zero. Grateful for the entire BYTE team, consisting of Umar M., Angelina Tibayan, Meet Patadia, Yeji L., Hetvi M., Parth P., Pearl Ved, Areej Ubaid, Arshiya Das, Rayan Roshan, Naetri Niranjan, Johan Philip, Jacob Mobin, and everyone else @ BYTE for helping for turn this ambitious idea into something real. I’m proud of what we built, and even more excited to see what comes next. #TMUTechWeek #BYTE #StudentLeadership #Operations #BuiltFromZero #TMU #CS #CEng #BTM