CSS in 2019-20 and the EPS Awards

- Date Posted: May 7, 2020

It is fair to say that CSS has had another successful year. In September 2019, the School welcomed over 800 new students, and we have now reached almost 300 members - which is an all time high! The Committee has worked hard over the last 14 months to bring over 60 events, from starting our series of Developer Student Club workshops, to our big events like the CSS Ball. We’ve also collaborated with many other societies around campus, including AFNOM, oSTEM, Startup Society and others.

EPS Society Awards

It’s time for the EPS Awards 2020! Every year, we get the opportunity to recognise the best societies in the EPS Community by celebrating the achievements and events from over the last year, and our members. There are 13 awards which we can win:

• Sports Personality of the Year
• Sports Team of the Year 2019/20
• Outstanding Event Award
• Volunteer of the Year
• Outreach Award
• Diversity and Inclusion Award
• Industrial Award
• EPS Community Award
• Inspirational Committee Member
• Role Model of the Year
• Head of College Idea of the Year
• The Great Achievement in EPS Award
• Society of the Year 2019/20

The Nominations website also says what each award is about and you can see example nominations and past winners as well. Remember, the most important thing is the quality of the nominations, not the quantity, so make sure you say exactly why something/someone should win.

Nominations for each award are open now and are open until Friday 22nd May. Anyone can nominate anybody from the society for Awards. So, if you’ve enjoyed a great event, or think somebody within the society has made an impact and deserves to win an award for anything since May 2019, then you can nominate on the EPS website: cssbham.com/awards.

A Year in CSS

In the Autumn Semester, we hosted Local Hack Day: Learn. This was a one day mini-conference where we ran a few workshops and taught some hackathon skills. We opened to local students and had almost 70 attendees. Later in the semester, we worked with AFNOM to bring Linux InstallFest once again this year, we also sponsored HackTheMidlands 4.0, as well as attending AstonHack.

November 2019 was equally busy as October. The headline event of the month was our Qiskit Hackathon. This was one of the largest projects we have delivered in recent years. Working with the IBM Qiskit team, we ran 2 workshops on quantum computing and how IBM uses quantum with the Qiskit framework. On the 16th November, we held our hackathon in Computer Science. Over 120 people attended the workshops and almost 70 people took part on the weekend. Thanks to the support from IBM, we even catered this event with breakfast, lunch and dinner. In the end, the judges were very impressed with all of the teams and there were two joint winning teams.

In December, we closed out the semester with a board games night with the School and our annual Christmas Meal. This year, we returned to the S’Oak, dining with 88 members.

There is no doubt that CSS’ normal Spring calendar was affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. However, we were still able to bring you lots of events through January and February. We celebrated Chinese New Year, played badminton, and held an international film night. February was also LGBT History Month, as part of this we held a trip to Bletchley Park with oSTEM. Bletchley Park was one of the most important sites during the war where the Enigma Code was broken. It was the workplace of Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computing and an important member of the LGBT community. In February, we also hosted Google Hash Code, a programming competition which we ran in Computer Science.

We rounded out the tail end of the Spring Semester with our annual CSS Ball. This year we moved location to the Malmaison hotel, at the Mailbox in Birmingham centre. The Ball this year was a massive success for CSS. We upscaled our event from the usual 100 attendees, to 130 this year. We even sold out of ticket in less than 95 minutes! The event this year also included some fun things such as a photobooth, and you can see the event photos on our Facebook Group.

Finally, in the 2019-20 run of events comes our AGM. Ususally, we would hold our AGM in person, but the circumstances this year mean that we have held our Committee Elections online. Welcome to the new Committee, who you can find on the committee page. We look forward to the many events the new committee will bring over the next year. We also want to know what the members would like. Please tell us what we can do over the Summer and at the start of the next year on the Facebook group.