Semester One Recap

Hey everyone, and welcome to CISSA’s newest endeavour! This blog is going to be a space dedicated to updating you guys on everything going on in CISSA, as well as any relevant technology and industry news.

To kick things off, we’re going to review what we got up to in semester one.

We started off the year with a ‘Welcome Back’ barbeque, where we got the chance to meet you guys and let you know more about us. We followed this up with a panel of industry experts who discussed the topic of computer science and where it can take you.

A couple of employer talks were next on the agenda, with Jane Street, Atlassian and Woodside coming to explain what their companies are all about, and to answer any questions you might have for them.

Collaborating with our sponsor Jane Street, we ran an ‘Electronic Trading’ challenge. This composed of a daylong programming contest aimed at building trading bots that competed against each other, as well as the market.

Our next event was our annual hackathon, CodeBrew. Started in 2015, CodeBrew aims to provide students the platform to tackle ideas that affect our everyday lives. This year’s theme was ‘Building a connected world’. To support our students, we ran workshops with our sponsors to help further their skills and inspire ideas. The teams tackled a variety of issues during the event, such as helping communities during disasters, forging a better connection between owners and consumers, and many more.

Following on from this, we were also fortunate enough to partner up with Microsoft, and four teams from CodeBrew were selected to compete directly in the Microsoft Imagine Cup Australia Finals. One of the teams even made it through, which meant they got the chance to compete at the global finals in America.

While this was all happening, we realised that to continue making CISSA even better and bigger than before, we had to recruit some help. And so we decided to open up applications for our various subcommittees. From a team of 11, we have now grown to almost 30 and are incredibly pleased with the results so far. We also had our SGM where we recruited our new UX Officer, Cathy, and our Diversity Officer, Grace.

We also had a networking BBQ with Accenture, followed by the CISSA pub night that very same day, both of which gave us the chance to meet the newest subcommittee members as well as more of you guys.

Next up was our Industry Networking Night. We had such an amazing turnout this year, with representatives from various innovative companies coming to talk to our students and develop connections.

We also had many more employer talks to round off the semester, including SAP, EY, IRESS, and Deloitte. In addition, we collaborated with Facebook who came to coach you guys on how to go about your technical interview with their ‘Crush Your Coding Interview’ workshop.

We’d also like to add that we couldn’t have done what we did last semester without our many sponsors. So thank you! (Full list can be found here.)

Let’s bring on semester two!