On the final day of 3DEXPERIENCE World 2023, the General Session is the day we celebrate what makes SOLIDWORKS great: our amazing community of users.
First up today was Suchit Jain, Vice President of Strategy & Community, SOLIDWORKS, to provide an update on the growing, thriving SOLIDWORKS community.
Suchit introduced to the stage Erin Winick Anthony, who the SOLIDWORKS community will know as we have seen her evolve from a college student studying Mechanical Engineering to an entrepreneur, launching her first business, Sci Chic in 2015, while still in college.
“This is really a full circle moment for me being here,” says Erin. Erin has made sharing her passion for science into a thriving business and is very involved with sharing her love of making on various social media platforms, particularly on TikTok. She is also launching a new business venture, which is announced at the event, Steam Power Media.
Suchit then welcomed Vicky Wu Davis, Founder of Creating Impact Through Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainability (yCITIES), a nonprofit that prepares the next generation of innovators by educating and nurturing middle and high school students. The program runs boot camps with lots of hands-on activities to encourage students to get involved with STEM.
When the pandemic hit, yCITIES had to get creative so Vicky transitioned the program to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, which enabled them to easily pivot to virtual learning. “With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, it was a win-win. I was looking for a virtual way to capture the messy, yet critical parts of innovation with a distributed team of students and mentors,” she says. “My curriculum is a really great way for folks to see the applicability of using a platform, like 3DEXPERIENCE platform, across the whole entrepreneurial journey.”
Next came the big reason SOLIDWORKS is everywhere: the passionate community. Dan Wagner and Matthew Clegg joined the main stage to share updates to the SOLIDWORKS User Group Network (SWUGN) and the SOLIDWORKS Champions Program.
In 2022, SWUGN added 71 new groups, sponsored 524 in-person meetups, and now includes groups in 48 countries! The Champions program has expanded to 813 members in 59 countries. It’s powerful to see how design, collaboration, and innovation spans countries and cultures, thanks to these passionate users.
The SWUGN and Champions segment concluded with three very important rewards to the best of the best users. These awards include: The Wayne Tiffany User Groups Leader of the Year Award, The Michelle Pillers Community Award, and the 2022 Champion of the Year. Congratulations to our winners!
Next up Suchit presented Christine Getman, Executive Director of Magic Wheelchair, a non-profit that builds customized costumes for children in wheelchairs, a check for $30,000. “This money will go towards the creation of many more epic costumes and empower more makers with disabilities.” Christine also announced that it has opened its first Magic Wheelchair wheelchair-accessible makerspace in Portland, OR.
The 3DEXPERIENCE World 2023 closing keynote speaker and fellow nerd Liv Boeree took the general session stage to share life lessons learned from poker. Boeree has an astrophysics degree, is a philanthropist with Raising for Effective Giving, YouTuber, and former number-one female poker player.
Boeree strives to inspire people through rational thinking techniques she learned over the course of her career. She shared that life, much like poker, is all about navigating uncertainty. How can we do this? Marrying our left and right brain to create a full view of the analytical and qualitative world as seen in the below image.
Boeree shared three practices to navigate our uncertain world:
Beware of luck delusion: humans often fall into a trap that we tend to give ourselves too much credit for our successes while looking for ways to outsource blame for our losses. This tends to come with a focus on results. Instead of fixating on an outcome, we should instead establish processes and evaluate how we perform against the process. Establish a strategy, then examine how we performed against it as opposed to only looking at wins and losses.
Quantify your beliefs: one number speaks 1k words. Boeree encourages us to look for probabilities in everything and make this part of your decision-making process. When you determine how likely you are to meet a result, the better you can understand the challenges ahead as well as what it will take to solve them.
Look for the win-wins: so often one person’s win is another person’s loss, but why does it have to be this way? How can we find ways to raise others as we find success? This line of thinking was critical to Boeree’s founding of the Raising for Effective Giving charity. This group take a percentage of poker winnings and giving the funds to a select group of charities.
So often humans are pitted against each other. This way of thinking is refreshing and much needed in today’s world. This win-win mentality is something we see in the greater SOLIDWORKS community. So many users show up for others in amazing ways – whether they are mentors with SWUGN and the Champions program or by dedicating time and expertise to groups like Magic Wheelchair. The SOLIDWORKS community continues to demonstrate a win-win approach to life and work. Always bet on SOLIDWORKS red.
Thank you to all of you who joined us for 3DEXPERIENCE World 2023, either virtually or in-person, and we are very excited to announce that 3DEXPERIENCE World 2024 will take place February 11-14th in Dallas, Texas. We hope to see you next year, y’all!
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