4. Attend Events
Closely related to attending user groups is attending events. These come in all shapes and sizes ranging from local single evening events to all day, or even all week, conferences. Last November I attended DDD 7 (Developer Developer Developer Day and yes 7 not 8 despite it being 2008 last year) in Reading at Microsoft’s Thames Valley Park campus. I met a lot of great people that weekend between the event and the meals before and afterwards, I came back with new ideas and also some new contacts but above all I had fun.
DDD events are usually quite laid back and so they are good for people to come along casually and get the feet wet. There are of course more formal, paid conferences which are often more specialised than events like DDD, however they have their benefits and many have quite large student discounts. If there are enough people interested in your class, you might be able to persuade a teacher / lecturer to arrange a trip for some of you to go to a conference and if you are lucky the faculty may pick up all or some of the tab. For example last year a few members of my class including myself were able to go to The Highland Filing: The Future of the Web in Edinburgh through our faculty with the help of one of the lecturers.
Again, the best places I could recommend to find events are EventBrite and DeveloperFusion.
