Two words to perfectly sum up this year’s CSS would be record breaking!

A record breaking number of 224 CSS members! Record breaking attendance at events, such as the new Talk Session seeing more than 80 students attend. Record breaking sponsorship from companies and partners meaning in turn we’ve spent more money than ever on our members to give them the best possible year. But that is just the tip of the iceberg!

The first major event for the 2017/18 committee was, as always, the annual CSS BBQ; an event dedicated to relax after the heavy exam period and before we break for summer. Music, a lovely atmosphere and delicious food cooked by committee members – what more could you want?

Freshers’ Week saw hundreds of new first year students get their first taste of Birmingham and studying Computer Science. So as always made sure the new students got to meet those from higher years and start mixing from their very first week. We all made the trip to Ming Moon restaurant in the City Centre to get to know each other.

We’ve launched a brand new event series for our members: Talk Sessions. These events see invited speakers share their knowledge and stories with Computer Science students. Our first iteration of this event had no set theme, instead a great mixture of talks that we knew our newest members would enjoy and find useful. This included talks from the Hacking Club AFNOM, Birmingham Autonomous Robotics Club and many more. This was by far our most successful event and saw a packed lecture room!

css-talks-2018

Next on our agenda list was something CSS had always wanted to do: our very own t-shirts. After a few months of picking the right shade of blue the result came out more amazing then any of us could expect!

css-tshirts-2018 1

Further down the line we co-hosted the 3rd annual Women in Technology Conference alongside WISE, the College’s Women in Science and Engineering Society. And of course we celebrated the end of first term with the annual Christmas meal.

css-christmas-meal-2017

With the new term came new ideas. We hosted two more Talk Sessions, this time focused on the dilemmas student face. One covered industrial placements, study abroad, masters and PhD programmes and was given by fellow students who had firsthand experience. The later we got 2nd and 3rd years to talk about module choices and advise 1st and 2nd years of what they modules are like, their experiences and what they learnt from them.

css-talks-2018 2

Next came our annual Ball at the JamHouse with a terrific turnout! We even decided to upscale from last year to make the 2018 CSS Ball a rather fancy black-tie party. It was great fun!

We are also increasing cross-society interaction and joined up with the University’s Start-Up Society to hold an event on emerging technologies where we had speakers present topics they were most passionate about.

Finally, at the end of this term our Hackathon returned! A 12 hour hackathon in the Computer Science Building with over £500 in prizes. It was a great deal of fun and some team made amazing products in the short time!

css-hackathon-2018

Overall we had an amazing year and we especially enjoyed making CS students lives more enjoyable whether it be with free t-shirts, prizes, Talk Session or lots and lots of pizza!

If you loved being part of CSS, or have enjoyed reading about us, please nominate us for an EPS Societies' Award!  We're the current holders of Society of the Year and would love to keep our title!

Arvydas Kubilius
CSS President 2017/18