We’re glad to hear that you’re interested in helping out the Stanford ACM. We’re all about hosting events aimed at the Stanford Computer Science community, and sponsoring these events is a good way to get your name known if you’re interested in recruiting from Stanford.

If there are particular events you are interested in sponsoring, please let us know which, and how much you would like to contribute. If you don’t have a particular event in mind, we are always in need of funds we can apply across events, and we will happily give your company credit at events we fund using your contributions. We have included amounts that we request in order to sponsor an event, but we are always able to make use of contributions, however large or small.

Here are a few events we do regularly:

Hackathons.

These are not ordinary hackathons where people show up just to party for 18 hours. Once per quarter, the ACM hosts an intense coding competition for valuable prizes. At our last hackathon, we gave iPad 2s to everyone on the first-place winning team, and an Xbox 360 with Kinect to everyone on our second place team. Well-known people from computer science come to judge the entries, including Adam D’Angelo (former Facebook CTO and co-founder of Quora) and Steven Bourne (author of the Bourne Shell). We rely on corporate sponsorship to be able to afford the prizes. Sponsors are welcome to attend the event (especially the demonstrations and judging at the end). We request $1000 to $2500 to sponsor this event in order to cover prizes.

Friday Tech Talks.

On every other Friday afternoon, we invite three speakers to give brief Tech Talks. Speakers are usually either students showing off cool projects they’ve been working on, or people from industry who come to talk about technical topics that might interest CS students. If you’re interested in giving a tech talk, check out StanfordACM.com for upcoming open slots and send us an email at ACM- Officers@lists.stanford.edu. For established companies who give tech talks, we request a minimum of $200 to cover the costs of food.

The key word in Tech Talk is tech – we want technical topics that will be interesting to CS and Engineering students. A Tech Talk should not be a recruiting pitch for your company, though it’s fine if you mention that you are recruiting. We want people to find the talks interesting even if they are not looking for a job, and a good Tech Talk is better than a recruiting pitch at getting the attention of Stanford students anyway.

Workshops.

At least once a quarter, Stanford ACM hosts workshops to teach students useful real-world software development skills. Last quarter, we hosted an Open Source Bootcamp to introduce CS students to how they could get involved in open source software development. We brought in engineers from Mozilla, Google, Facebook, and 10gen (creators of MongoDB) to teach coders the tools they need to contribute back to the open-source community. Over the course of 9 workshops, speakers covered areas from scaling web applications to managing open source releases. Hosting workshops is one of the best ways to gain respect for your company and show students that you’re more than just talk and no action.

Happy Hacky Hour.

Happy Hour for coders. People interested in hacking on stuff and chilling with like-minded students are invited to show up and work on whatever they want together for an evening. We do several of these per quarter, often in conjunction with other student groups. We provide pizza and non-alcoholic drinks. We would love to get everyone drunk (for the Ballmer peak) but it’s too much hassle. We request a minimum of $200 to sponsor this event.

Faculty Dinner.

When they’re not teaching classes, Stanford faculty actually do some pretty cool research. We host dinners for students to interact with professors of Computer Science and learn about the research programs that go on here. We request a minimum of $1000 to sponsor this event, and we rely on sponsorship to afford catering.

LAN Party.

Computer Science students are often also gamers. Together with Low Battery (the Video Gaming club on campus), we host LAN parties three times per quarter, where people show up and play whatever they want (typically, a lot of Starcraft 2 and Counter Strike). If we find companies interested in sponsoring it, we would consider holding a Starcraft 2 tournament for prizes this year. This is a good way to get noticed especially for game or social game companies. We request a minimum of $100 to sponsor LAN parties, and if you want to fund a Starcraft 2 tournament with prizes, we would need enough sponsorship to be able to afford the prizes.

Get in touch

If any of these sound like events you’d like to sponsor, please let us know. We’ll keep you posted about upcoming events, and you are welcome to send a representative or two to check them out and meet students (though if you do, please try to keep in mind that we keep our students pretty busy at these events.)

Thanks very much for your interest, and don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

You can contact us at ACM-Officers@lists.stanford.edu.

If you would like to send us a check, please make it out to “Stanford ACM” and mail it to:

Stanford ACM c/o Jake Becker
729 Escondido Rd, Apt 138
Stanford, CA 94305