CSS had a truly exciting term! The society's membership keeps growing breaking records with freshers being welcomed to the society with a varied, event-packed calendar. President Tom Goodman tells us more.
CSS has had a record-breaking semester, to kick off what we hope to be a truly record-*smashing* year!
With over 40 calendar events, we were able to put on more than twice the usual number, keeping everyone excited and engaged, and bringing together over 220 members!! In the hope of becoming even more transparent with our members, we also revealed a provisional calendar for all of our events in the semester - giving everyone far more notice of exactly what we had going on throughout.
We kicked off Freshers’ week with our annual trip to Ming Moon, where over 100 Freshers (and members from other years to welcome them), trekked across to the city centre to gorge themselves on a delicious all you can eat buffet.
Leading Freshers to Ming Moon and the Freshers' Meal
Following on from this, we had our Freshers Welcome Night at the Bristol Pear on Friday, managing to cram over 120 members into the private upstairs function room - a lovely evening for all involved.
To try and encourage everyone to get involved with the wider tech scene too, e.g. Hackathons, we put on a welcome talk where I spoke about the various tech organisations in the city (and further afield), and also had the pleasure of a talk from Julia Higginbottom from Rebel Uncut, a wonderful local activist & speaker in the tech scene.
First years listening to the welcome talk given by the managing director of Reber Uncut
The following week, we had a returning speaker in the form of Jon Kingsley, who once again gave an awesome talk about security - it's always a pleasure to have a talk from him, and the Sloman lounge was packed with people to hear it.
Computer security talk with Jonathan Kingsley
The term was packed full of a variety of events, including trips to Hackathons, our Extraordinary General Meeting that saw the election of the new committee members, sports events, collaboration with the BCS, Startup Soc, GDS, Argos, and Kainos (amongst others). We also threw another board games evening in collaboration with the School of Computer Science.
On 30 October we hosted a spooky Halloween pub night and decorated the School with loads of cobwebs, pumpkins, and other assorted spooks. With both students and staff invited, we had around 150 people taking part in our largest event this semester.
Halloween pub night in the School
1 December gave us the chance to put on our local instalment of Local Hack Day, an initiative by MLH to get people across the world to learn, build, and share for 12 hours, all on one day! Our Industrial Liaison, Rav did an incredible job organising the event, and we were delighted to have members of the ACSS (Aston) and HaCS (BCU) join us.
Local Hack Day
On Friday 7 December, CSS held its annual Christmas Meal, once again at the S'Oak. Over 85 members came together to celebrate the nearing of the end of term with some lovely food. What a wonderful evening it was!
The term was brought to a close with the end of term pub night on 14 December - filled with revelry and karaoke, a great time was definitely had by all.
That's it for this semester, but now the committee has to start the crucial planning for next semester. Keep your eyes peeled for updates on our Facebook page! We hope you have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy a New Year. Here's to a wonderful second semester to come!
Tom Goodman
CSS President 2018/2019
