Hello CS folks!
We hope you had a wonderful winter break and are ready for the upcoming term!
We were thrilled to see you on campus last term after two years of online learning. Unfortunately, Covid-19 restrictions mandated us to adjust many of our event offerings. Nonetheless, many great things have happened that we would like to share with you. 🥳
In September, we started the new school year with the CSSS First-Year Welcome. Our department’s professors, Patrice Belleville and Kemi Ola, kindly joined forces with several student speakers (Eric Yan, Cyrus Kalafchi, Leonard Wang, Maja Evans, Henry Huynh, Vedika Seth) to tackle first-year questions. This virtual event is also the first time we tried out a Zoom breakout room panel where each room had a speaker talking about a different topic. 🎓
Then, as we moved into October, we had our first offline event, the Halloween social👻. Lots of you showed up to show off your spooky outfits👹 and the opportunity to meet everyone since the Cube’s reopening!
In November, we had our professional photoshoot event which is, non-surprisingly, extremely popular (> 100 attendants)📷.
Finally, in December, we had two events happening on the same day (Dec. 2), the Research Night and Movie Night. For the Research Night, we invited a guest panel consisting of Prof. Joanna McGrenere, A. Finn Hackett, Eric Yan, Dryden S. Wiebe, Rebecca Lin, Matthew Tang to introduce the undergraduate research options in UBC CS. Immediately after that, we ended the term by showing the Academy Award-winning movie Parasite🎞.
We were not slacking off in Cyberspace either. In fact, our online community has grown enormously in the last four months. The CS Discord doubled from around 600 members in the summer to 1500 members! Aside from that, we hosted the well-received CSSS Summer Olympic in addition to regular game nights during the summer break. In this event, we celebrated the Tokyo Olympics by organizing nerdy events that all CS students love. Yes, coding competitions and keyboard typing challenges ⌨🖱.
For those of you who frequent our website, you may have noticed changes to the tutor page and the addition of a new clubs page. We have many more cool features coming✨
As we move into the new semester, we have many events lined up. You should already see Maple CTF (Capture the Flag/White hat hacking/Security competition) occurring from January 21 - 28. This is part of a week-long event called CS Week which we hope will become the defining event of UBC CS. Stay tuned for more information. 🤩