Noticing what the association wasn't using
Apr 2026 / 3 min
- Events
- Operations
- Leadership
My first event happened on my second day at Politecnico. I asked older PoliNetwork members whether I could run a meetup for incoming Computer Engineering students, put together an invite, and somewhere between 150 and 200 people showed up through Google Calendar RSVPs. What I took from it wasn't that I could pull a crowd. It was that the association had a whole dimension, events, that nobody was really touching.
The next year I ran it wider, opening it to all freshmen and partnering with a pizzeria near Piazza Leonardo, and roughly a thousand people came. Lines down the street, the place full. It was still essentially a one-person operation on the organizing side, and that was the ceiling I'd hit: a thing that works once because I carried it isn't a thing that repeats.
So I stopped running them alone. I built a team and ran two more that year, smaller by design at around 400 people each, but with structure underneath: a second venue partnership, and feedback collected systematically instead of judged by feel, so I had real numbers instead of a guess about whether it went well. I also built an ongoing partnership with University Network that got us a stand at their student festival, and I brought four other associations along with us. The honest tension through all of it was never a crisis to fix. It was the plainer discomfort of promoting something and not knowing if anyone would come, and the work was turning a thing that happened to work into a thing built to.