CSS' Best Semester - 2024/25 Semester 1 Overview
- Date Posted: Dec 14, 2024
What a blazing start it’s been for CSS - there’s so much that’s happened, even I’ve struggled to keep up!
If you need a quick reminder on what’s happened, let’s go over everything…
What’s been on this semester
Since our welcome week, we’ve been running a mix of new and recurring events, kicking off first with Cream Tea with TeaSoc! Even if we ended up buying Sainsbury’s full stock of scones and forgot the cream, it was still an incredibly successful event, giving us the chance to catch up with everyone after the chaos of welcome week. Thank you once again to TeaSoc for hosting this event with us <3
On the more technical side, we’ve been able to host a few workshops held by fellow students on what interests them - the first two held by Amrit, who bathed us in his love for Lua (the presentation itself being written in Lua!), and Matt, who travelled across the country to come back to UoB and give a beginner’s workshop on Python!
After that, we leaned back into our social side and ran our annual Halloween Quiz, where we saw a vast range of bizarre costumes and teams battling to win a swarm of Blahajs, and an Aftonsparv for the costume competition! Despite a marking error at the end that did end up affecting the final scores (oops), the event went wonderfully and it was incredible to see so many people dressed up.
Then, sometime in between we were declared war upon by Bad Film Society, who egregiously accused us of using their “brand identity” for some harmless publicity… needless to say, I will break my silence on this matter and will confirm that I have not tolerated this baseless slander, and that we have spoken diplomatically to find a negotiation that will appease both parties. However, I fear that we will have to resort to measures that will take us both down, as I will not kneel to Bad Film’s unreasonable demands and let them step over CSS like a doormat. We will win this war, one way or another!! 🔥🔥🔥
(For anyone struggling to read the post, you can see it in full here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DCgljIPtNO2/ )
Towards the end of the semester, we rounded off with three big events - this being the Bar Crawl, our usual Christmas Meal and the return of the legendary Discord Botathon!
On the 30th of November, we hosted a bar crawl that traversed throughout the city of Birmingham, starting at Mr Mulligan’s, making our way to the energetic Heidi’s, partying our way to the Brasshouse before finally finishing off at the Soloman Cutler.
Following that, on the 5th of December, we held our Christmas Meal, returning once again to the Green Man in Harborne! We just happened to visit on a quiz night as well, so some groups of CSS members formed teams and participated in the quiz - one getting second place, and another getting second to last. Regardless, it was a wonderful way to conclude the semester, and it was wonderful to see so many people there!
Finally, on the 8th of December we hosted the Discord Botathon, the first since 2021. Seven different teams responded to the call and built a Discord bot from scratch, some learning from the bot workshop held the day before. Here’s how the final standings looked:
- Texagotchi, with their beautiful illustrations of TeX and creative approach to the Tamagotchi concept!
- Garlic Tone, that looked like it was ready to break every time we came to judge it, but took advantage of Discord’s remix feature to let users illustrate their pictures - something we weren’t expecting!
- ETH Tracker, with their responsive and robust structure using Kafka to separate the processing of data from the bot’s workload!
Congratulations once again to the team behind Texagotchi, who have won Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Ws!
New Faces on Committee
In November, we held our first EGM of the year to fill in roles in committee that were either already empty, being stepped down from or were being rolled over - which resulted in a wave of new faces on our committee! If you run into them, don’t be afraid to say hi.
Congratulations once again to:
- George - Socials Secretary
- Sabrina - EDI Officer
- Nial - PGT Rep
- Joe - PGR Rep
Since Re-Open Nominations won the vote for First Year Rep, we’ll be following up with another EGM early in semester 2. If you’re a first year student who has enjoyed CSS’ events so far and wants to get even more involved, then keep an eye on your email and social media for EGM announcements!
Hoodies
We’ve had quite a few people ask about them, and we’re planning to deliver - hoodies will be on sale again in the near future! 🎉
Contrary to our usual convention, we’ll have both zipped and non-zipped hoodies available on sale, using the designs from previous years. When they become available, we’ll send an announcement on our social media and Discord server, then you’ll be able to get them from https://cssbham.com/hoodies. As of currently, we’re just awaiting approval from the Guild to put them on sale.
For everyone waiting on thigh highs - we’re trying our best, but these will still be a work in progress for now!
Members
You might’ve seen on Instagram that we recently reposted a screenshot from a reel that the Guild made, creating their own “wrapped” that summarised the year for societies so far. We were in one of the categories, and as of currently, we have the second-highest membership count in the entire Guild, standing at 404 (not found) members! That number has only been seen once previously in the second semester, but CSS has pre-emptively smashed it out of the park.
That’s not even the full picture though, since that number has only accounted for standard memberships - if anyone has been at UoB since 2022, there were a series of changes to how external memberships worked (these are non-students and staff who want to be part of a society), lengthening the process and adding extra roadblocks which has since deterred alumni students and others from joining a society as an external member. However, this year, we’ve had 4 external members join us, leading to a total of 408 members - which is the exact membership count we hit at the end of 2022/23 and the highest number of members CSS has seen in its 20+ years of history.
This was not a record we aimed to reach this year - as mentioned in the EGM, our original goal was to help bring awareness to CSS and what we do early on, then allow people to settle into the society in their own time and if they choose to do so; and that is still true today. However, it’s still left us on committee lost for words, and I think it speaks for the effort that they’ve all put in this semester. Thus, I want to give my most sincere thank you to the entirety of CSS committee this semester for making the impossible possible, putting everything they have into what they love, and being an unshakable team that can withstand even the toughest of tasks.
But of course, let’s not forget the reason we’re actually in this position - it’s thanks to you. CSS has maintained its unique and eccentric community throughout the years, but it wouldn’t be that way without the members that make up that community. Thus, whether you’ve given a workshop, joined us in events or simply hanged around in Discord, CSS would not be the same without you - thank you for making this our best semester in CSS’ history. 💙
What’s next
As I round off this newsletter, I’d like to give you a brief glimpse into what we’re looking to prepare next semester.
We’ve already started planning our larger events, such as our trip to the National Museum of Computing, the glamorous Ball, and the AGM to elect the entirety of committee for the new year. However, we also have a mystery event that we are currently working with the school on, as well as a few other societies to participate in. It’s been a long while since we’ve seen this kind of event at UoB, but perhaps some events we’ve run this semester and will run the next semester too may give you a small idea… oh yeah, and calling for peace in the chaos of war against Bad Film.
However, we’d also like to hear from you about how things went this semester - if there’s any events you’d like to see or have some thoughts on how we ran this semester, we have opened our feedback survey, which should take no more than 5 minutes to fill out and will shape how the society runs next semester. You can fill it out here: https://cssbham.com/feedback
If you’d also like to run a workshop on a subject of your choice like other members did this semester, then don’t be afraid to reach out to committee!
Until next time, on behalf of the rest of CSS’ committee, I’d like to wish everyone a happy holidays, and enjoy the winter break - we’ll see you again for an even better semester in January!
Best Regards,
Holly P.
CSS President