This semester has been a very busy one for CivSoc. The new committee’s main aim was to offer as many opportunities to our members as possible, something that so far we feel we are achieving. We kicked off on the Friday of Freshers Week, organising a football activity for the first years, giving them an opportunity to meet the rest of CivSoc. As always, our first main event was the High Vis Bar Crawl which was again, a huge success and a great way to merge all four years of Civil Engineering. A week later we held a very different event: An Evening with Carillion. CivSoc worked closely with Carillion and the EPS Alumni Relations team to organise this event and it was greatly appreciated by all our members. The evening gave students the opportunity to hear presentations from Section Engineers, Graduate Recruitment Officers and the Site Manager for the new University of Birmingham Library. This was followed up by a ‘speed-dating’ exercise which enabled students to have an informal chat with each rep in small groups. CivSoc would like to say a special thanks to Grace Surman and Siobhan Dunne for all their help in organising this event. We can only hope to plan many more like this in the future!
CivSoc have also had great success with our new sporting activities. We have recently established a netball team with the help of second years Sarah Jackson and Susanna Elks. The team train weekly and are looking forward to our first ever match, against Mechanical Engineering. We hope to triumph over Mech Eng once again with our football team breaking their losing streak in great style beating the team 5-1. Credit has to go to Ben Thorne who got 3 goals past the Mech Eng keeper. We also secured a 2-2 draw against the Carillion site staff, coming back from 2-0 down at half time.
Alongside our sporting activities we have also been running some new events such as our Halloween ‘Zombie Smurf Night’ which saw our members donning white caps and blue faces and all having a great time. We also organised two visits to the new University library site which were well attended and enjoyed by all, and we look to promote further site visits in the future.
CivSoc have a few more events left for the rest of the semester, all of which should be enjoyable evenings! We will once again take part in the annual Stamina Bar Crawl, will be offering help for interview preparation for applicants on the RESPECT scheme and have been working hard to find the perfect location for our Christmas meal.
A special mention must be made to our new First Year Reps, Emma Maclaughlin and Ekaterina Kuznetsova. We would like to welcome them to the committee and hope they embrace their new roles, aimed at encouraging first year involvement.
