A Look Back at Semester 1
Welcome to Semester 2! As everybody gets back their groove and enters another exciting period of learning, it’s worth having a look back to see what we did as a community over the course of last semester.
As a student, your options for learning and growing in Uni aren’t limited to academic work. Thanks to our wonderful partners and generous sponsors, we helped host numerous learning and networking opportunities on campus. For those eager to learn, we hosted workshops such as an Introduction to HTML & CSS (with our friends at Le Wagon), an insight into Cyber Security Design with the resourceful people at Deloitte, and a “Dirty Hands” workshop with SAP where we learnt how to build chatbots and got insight on how applications are engineered by them. For those seeking direct personal development, we also offered our mentorship program where you can be matched up with a mentor and get direct, personal help and feedback on their learning as well as any projects they are working on!
For those who are keen to apply themselves, we’ve held events ranging from workshops to company meetups, offering you opportunities to network with various companies and assist you in considering future pathways beyond Uni. Our Intro to Technical Interviews workshop and Intern Chat events presented students just like yourself to share their experiences in applying for, and successfully achieving an internship in many notable companies within the tech industry, from Accenture to Xero. Representatives from these and many other Australian STEM companies also came together during our Science Careers Conversations networking night, which we hosted in hand with Women In Tech and the Faculty of Science, giving you the chance to socialise and interact with employers and find out companies which piqued your interest. Finally, we are grateful to have many of these companies present Tech Talks at our campus directly, such as Palantir, EY, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google (which happened to be our largest event to date!).
For those keen to compete and immediately apply and show off their knowledge and skills, we also hosted and promoted various camps and competitions, in collaboration with our sponsors. On campus, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting a Microsoft Coding Competition, along with Women In Tech. Later in the semester, we are also fortunate to be able to host the Imagine Cup Regional Finals. On the hackathon front, we of course continued our annual tradition, with the 2018 CodeBrew (a recap of which you can read all about here). Outside of Uni, we also spotlighted notable events from our sponsors, such as Accenture’s Tech Bootcamp, as well as Facebook’s FBHack.
Of course, as a club we are more than just studying and careers. Our club barbecues, carnival stands and pub nights provided many opportunities for you to socialise and interact with your fellow students over cheap/free food and free swag. It may also have been your very first look at CISSA (personally, it’s how I initially found out myself), so if you have a friend studying Computing, or really anyone interested in the field, don’t be hesitant to bring them to one of these events!
This semester has been a whirlwind of excitement and fun for us to organise, and we hope you have enjoyed what we presented over the past few months. We definitely couldn’t have done this alone, though! Our friends at Women In Tech and the Uni’s Faculty of Science, as well as our sponsors including SAP, Microsoft, Atlassian, Google, Telstra, EY, Accenture, Palantir, Facebook and Deloitte have our lasting gratitude for helping us organise events featured here. Of course, this is definitely not the end, as we have many, many more events coming up in Semester 2. To stay updated on those, sign up as a member of CISSA, and follow us on our Facebook page and group, as well as our Twitter account.
Cheers to another great Semester!
