Why join such a big event?
The expected answer: to learn and make an impact. The real answer: I don't really know. As I finished my freshman year, which was full of these huge, student-organized events that were highly appreciated by our university, I was filled with enthusiasm. When I saw GSR's recruiting poster, I applied without even thinking it through. I don't even remember what committees I ranked as my top three choices, or how I even ended up in HR
Anyways, I got an interview email and was frightened—in some way even shocked—at why a university event would need interviews to onboard literally young students. After prepping like it was a job or internship interview and getting my acceptance email, I realized it was real: I was going to be working on something entirely new. What even is HR? How do I 'manage' people when I'm barely managing myself? How do I best learn to handle this position? So many questions.
I called my uncle, who works as an HR specialist, and we talked for over an hour and a half as he gave me plenty of advice. I did a lot of research, even psychological, on how to best manage people and perform top-tier HR work, which initially included Performance Management and Member Relations. What made this even scarier was that the committee leader sort of threw us into the deep end and wanted us to learn things from scratch. It meant endless Canva documents, Word documents, spreadsheets, and more boring stuff. Our committee even had the lowest number of members. Sounds really boring, huh?
Working on a "vacation"
As this was a real, global, 'university-trending' kind of event and a huge conference, I was scared that breaks wouldn't be possible and that I would have to be working all day—even while traveling for two weeks to Austria with my family. It was incredibly overwhelming. I wanted to prove myself within my work and produce something truly meaningful, even though I was in an HR committee where my work didn't directly affect the conference itself. I was constantly trying to balance having fun while traveling with working at the same time
I would join two-hour meetings, work on trains, and pull all-nighters. I can say now that this wasn't my best decision, but at the time, I was satisfied with myself. The views of Zell am See's mountains were charming tho, working there is truly charming 🌧️
Sharing some of the HR work
Hear me out, the work we did in HR was not thaat boring, it felt like running a real company. I remember even benchmarking open source documents from real companies to get an idea of what they use and how they manage their employees.
Worked on crafting and oragnzing multiple training sessions for the team, including Personal Branding, Leadership, How to build a budget, and how to conduct interviews
Detailed, researched, performance evaluations, this really felt like a compnay hr task lol, and it wasn't easy
Members Engagment content was my personal favorite, we did fun engaging content like trivia questions, challenges among the members, newsletters, awards and rewards.
What touched me the most was seeing the members take a break and engage given the amount of work they had (i.e. draining work)
GSR Weekend Bootcamps
To be honest, the bootcamps held on different weekends were unforgettable highlights of the GSR journey. The environment was very similar to a startup company, where we worked agilely with hectic conversations, ongoing tasks, and intense brainstorming sessions. The downside, though, was the bad grades I got on the quizzes we had right after—NOT A GOOD MEMORY!
Everyone Knows GSR - Marekting & Recruitng Campaign
🚨 New Side Quest Alert
Everyone Knows GSR was a marketing and recruiting campaign my awsome team and I worked on with a lot of creativity. We were planning it a few weeks before the beggining of fall semester since we wanted students to KNOW about GSR from the very beggining of the new year.
We started with some crazy ideas, and oh I mean crazy. Some were a zipline, a huge wall with GSR theme posters, and an umbrella hallway with GSR themed umbrellas. Ya we thought we had 3-5 million riyals in our pockets.
We had meetings at 1:00 AM planning, aaand we had emeregncy meetings as well. Among us was a sign of that.
Despite the draining work we went through during this campaign, and unfortunately there were many amazing ideas that could not be implemented, I'm very gratful for the team, Hajar, Yara, Osama and Dina ⭐️
Found ourselves in Bahrain
Yes, a new side quest. Another team I found myself in is the outreach team, which was the team responsible for "outreaching" GSR to researchers and visitors from all around the world 🌎
So there were plans to visit univeristies and market for GSR and recruit researchers, and my trip was to Gulf University - Bahrain. I drove there with 3 other girls, met and connected with many amazing bahraini students, presented seminars and drove around and explored Manama afterwards 🇧🇭
To be honest my work in this committee was short and not that exhausting, but what was most fun was connecting and chatting with people from all around the world, through multiple social media platforms.
GSR Gatherings and online meetings
By the way, did I tell you I then became the VP of the HR committee? Ya well in August I became the VP and led my team in the committee, also was one of my first experiences in leading. What I remeber most made me happy was the comments I gor from the committee members in the monthly evalutaions, some that touched my heart were:
The downside tho was 5x more meetings, day and night...
Steering meetings were the "serious meetings" where each committee shared their progress. They uses to last for hours, I recall one reached 3 hours long.
The HR meetings were the friendly ones where we brainstomred (one of my fac activities) and discussed how to engage the members more.
GSR online meetings were the meetings that tought me how to communicate effectively with others, how to share progress and negotiate and discuss, how to unblock blockers and reach a solution, and how to prove your opinion or point.
Designer Joud
Ya, you guessed it, a new side quest. As my passion for design at that time grew, I found myself designing a few GSR visuals, inlcuding posters, cards, and my favorite work, the GSR team booklet. At that time I truly discovered that I am a bit of visual geek, I cared a lot about visuals and their emotional effect on people.
Some of my design work:
I am currently organzing my design portfolio slash folder to view all my designs, stay tuned
And now the product I was truly proud of and enjoyed content creating it and designing as well, the GSR booklet.
I crafted this 80-page booklet in just 2 weeks. It was a draining project for me, but I truly wanted to deliver something meaningful to the team and leave them with a catalog of their GSR memories. It was also my first time designing such a comprehensive detailed booklet; it took a lot of meetings to finalize the brainstormed content, hours and hours of designing, and liters of caffeine.
It also took a lot of time to find a bookstore that can print this booklet in good quality, thanks to Baher for bearning with me on this logistcal part ☝🏻
The booklet was gifted to the members at the conference ceromony, and I couldn't be happier to see their reactions and moments when browsing it.
The Big Day
February, the month we have been waiting for. The month where the efforts of months was about to pay off.
The final bootcamp of GSR was hectic, well more than that. Committees debating, finalzing, coffee everywhere. Hosting the first global conference where people from all around the world come to see is definelty not easy. We as the HR tried to keep everyone in pace during that weekend, capturing moments and documenting as well. In addtion to my side questing of continiuos designing
And these are some snippets from 3 amazing days of GSR Conference, 2-4 Feb. Yes I side quested for the last time and was responsible of the registration. It was fun tho, I got to see huge guests and speakers from different countries and weclome them, and yapped a lot with collegues.
What truly inspired me, regardless of the organization itself, was seeing such young researchers present their work on complex and profound topics across science, business, and technology. It was amazing to witness their passion for making meaningful discoveries in their fields and presenting their findings to leading researchers and curious minds.
Saying our goodbyes
Oh, I have been desperately waiting for this ending to come, and I’m just a bit emotional. This journey wasn’t just another university initiative, organization, or committee work; this was an actual experience of working at a real company, of building and creating something from scratch, of learning how to communicate, of learning how not to take things personally, of discovering skills and interests, and of making great memories. I won’t lie, I had a couple of burnouts during my work at GSR, especially given the fact that I was balancing it with my much more draining work at the computer club. The main lesson I learned here is that not everything has to be 100% perfect. This was mainly the part that drained me drastically: wanting everything to be perfect, on time, and detail-oriented to the MAX, and when I say max, oh, I mean max. GSR was also where I learned that quality is better than quantity, and to research and have good backup for your findings and outputs.
We gathered in Feb to celebrate the success of the conference with the university president, and each committee was rewarded. We said our goodbyes, and just like that, the nine-month side-quest journey came to an end. It was such a weird feeling afterward—an odd calmness after continuous, loud work and meetings almost every day. Suddenly, the busy routine that had become such a big part of our lives was over, leaving us with great memories and a sense of accomplishment.
I couldn’t be more grateful to have learned from so many people—and when I say people, I mean such young, second- to fourth-year college students who initially had absolutely no idea what they were doing! Thankful for my awesome team, for those I mentored in my HR subteam, and for every amazing member who left their mark on the first-ever Global Student Research Conference in the country.