[IKE]

Another +1 for event volunteering is that the time commitment is much more reasonable for a freshmen in college (still learning college time management skills). Basically you could do it as a long weekend possibly over a spring break (keep you out of trouble). The concentrated few days of effort is overall lower impact to your studies than 6+ weeks of long evenings and nights.

This will also help you appreciate/understand what the volunteers do for an event. This is something that will become increasingly important as more and more competitions keep sprouting up.

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If you are set on doing design strategy, you could host a strategy conference. The trick with this would be you need to be a good strategy facilitator versus good strategist yourself. Learning how to promote idea generation and maintaining the right amount of focus (not too much nor too little).

If it is competition strategy... That would be pretty tough to do without being part of a team.