The Qiskit Fall Fest is the world’s largest collection of student-run quantum computing events. The Fall Fest features a collection of hackathons, workshops, meetups, challenges, and more that take place on your campus. These events are all planned by you, with the support of IBM Quantum.

If selected, your event might be a giant weekend hackathon, where your entire computer science class takes over a lecture hall for 24 hours straight and competes to build the best quantum game. Or maybe you’ll plan a series of workshops for your IEEE club, inviting speakers from IBM Quantum (or other companies) to teach you all about the basics of quantum computing and Qiskit. The choice is yours, and we’re here to help make your vision a reality.

This year’s Qiskit Fall Fest is the third edition of this exciting event. Over the last 2 years, 36 universities have hosted quantum events, engaging more than 6000 students in total. We are eagerly looking forward to this year’s events, and we can’t wait to witness the energy and excitement you will bring!

These are all local events — meaning the group from Madrid only invites students from Madrid to participate, Yale only invites Yalies, and so on. Our goal with the Qiskit Fall Fest is to empower you, the student leaders, to build up your local quantum communities with great events powered by Qiskit. We also want to share the Qiskit brand directly with you to help give your event the credibility (and hype) of our entire Qiskit community.

Take it from Michelle Gelman, who ran the Fall Fest hackathon at the University of Texas Austin last year:

“The Fall Fest was an amazing experience for the Quantum Collective at UT Austin. We got to design our hackathon from the ground up. I invited guest speakers that our participants loved, and used IBM workshops to help everyone learn the basics. Most importantly, everyone had a blast building quantum projects regardless of their background. Being part of such an amazing community event really helped drive participation for our club, and our officers had a wonderful experience working with IBM Quantum.”

The Qiskit Fall Fest is supported by IBM Quantum, which means every student organizer will get free help and resources for their event. We’ll run a series of workshops all through September to prepare you and your team to run your event. We’ll cover logistics, advertising, event support, and more. IBM is also hosting a central homepage for all Fall Fest events. Check out the page from last year to get an idea of how it’ll all work.

Aside from that, IBM will provide a ‘thank you’ swag pack to you and your other student organizers. Additionally we will also provide Fall Fest graphics, templates, and other goodies to help make your job a bit easier.

Being an organizer isn’t for everyone, so I want to be honest about the expectations. This is YOUR event to design, through and through. If you haven’t organized an event before, or if you aren’t a part of a student club to collaborate with, this might be a tough experience. With that said, we recommend working with a team of people. Most Fall Fest organizers in 2022 spent at least 15 hours planning their events. If you haven’t used Qiskit before, we recommend you dive in and learn what it’s all about before volunteering for the Fall Fest. Don’t worry, we’ll be here next year too!

In terms of scale and setup of your event, it’s up to you. Whether it’s a crash course of Quantum 101 that you teach to 200 people using the Qiskit Textbook, or an intensive hackathon between 6 teams trying to implement a paper from arXiv, we trust you know what your fellow students will respond best to. If you’re selected to be part of the Fall Fest, you’ll be added to a private Discord server where we’ll communicate about all the details from now until October.

Qiskit Fall Fest Informational