CSS' Best Year - 2025 End of Year Newsletter
- Date Posted: Jun 24, 2025
Hello, hello, everyone! Congratulations on surviving this year of university. Whether you’re a first year who survived the wrath of DSA or a seasoned student who is preparing to graduate, I hope you’ve all had the chance to catch a well-deserved break from exams and studying in general, and have spent plenty of time with your friends and family, wherever in the country or even wherever in the world you may be now.
That occasion also marks the time to rewind and reflect on the experiences we’ve had throughout the entire year - and this is no different for CSS. Since I’ve already refreshed everyone on what we’ve done during semester 1, let’s go through what we’ve done throughout semester 2.
What’s been going on
We held a lot of quirky collaborations with other societies this semester, with societies both well-established and newly
created. For example: our regular SloLAN game night with GDS, UGG, VR and eSports; a very last-minute entry into the EPS
Sports Day with the Eagles, CivSoc, MathSoc and many others; and, our break; variation with CheeseSoc. We also settled
the score with Bad Film following the war waged in Semester 1, which we unfortunately lost because they had someone
who played Mario Kart Wii competitively for roughly 10 years, so we were set up from the very beginning! Regardless,
there was more of a focus on the larger events this semester - so we’ve been a bit quieter other than
for these events.
We held our biennial trip to The National Museum of Computing, learning about old machinery that may have been used during World War 2 and the earliest personal computers created. We were able to take on double the number of attendees we usually take every year, but the event still rapidly sold out. Despite that, we still had a blast revisiting the past, watching how technology changed through the decades, and even got to see some ambitious innovative technology that wasn’t particular popular at the time.
And of course, who could forget the incredible Ball!? This year, we held our annual Ball at Macdonald Burlington Hotel, a beautiful venue next to Birmingham New Street. Each attendee was treated to a 3-course meal before dancing the night away, celebrating everything that was achieved this academic year. It was an incredibly wonderful night for each and every one of us on committee, and we were incredibly happy to see our planning efforts pay off. It was difficult to get almost 170 attendees in a single photo, but if you made it on the night, see if you can find yourself in our massive group photo!
If you don’t see yourself, don’t worry, there are plenty of photos of the magical night at https://cssbham.com/ball/2025/photos.
And last but not least, but I also imagine to plenty of people’s surprise - we were able to hold an actual BBQ this year! With support from the Guild, we were able to cook your food, enjoy some cold drinks and celebrate the (near) end of exams together in the sun.
There is one more event I’ve not included here, but that’s because it deserves its own section of recognition - and this goes to none other than the legendary birmingHack.
birmingHack 1.0 - An Explosive Debut!
At our January EGM, we announced a long-awaited hackathon based in UoB called birmingHack, an idea that had been bounced around since 2023, and I wanted to make a reality this year. We brought the CS community of UoB together on the 22nd and 23rd of March, giving each team a full 24 hours to create something from scratch with the theme “Building Foundations” - to which those teams most certainly delivered.
There are numerous other challenges available throughout the event, such as extra categories teams could aim for other than the main theme, such as GDS’ “Best UI/User Experience” category, AlgoSoc’s “Best AI Hack without using an LLM” (which produced AI hacks that I was surprised to hear were made within the 24 hours!) and Majestic’s “Surprise Me!” category. However, there were also bonus challenges that were separate to the main hacking - such as AFNOM’s CTF, a cup-stacking challenge and AlgoSoc’s hilarious meme competition. To give a break from hacking, we held a lot of smaller break events, such as a midnight movie event, workshops for Git and the Neuphonic platform (one of our sponsors for the event), and general food breaks for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
There were several memorable projects submitted with different purposes, inspirations and skill levels, that all reflected the individual teams that pulled everything together. Some teams focused on projects that would help others, others worked on more lighthearted games that were quirky and fun, and others created some incredibly impressive AI projects, given only 24 hours was provided to work on each team’s project. However, there were two projects that were special in their own ways, of which were ThatsAwkward and none other than FLOORPLAN. ThatsAwkward was a project entirely built by conversion students, who learned absolutely everything (Git, APIs, Flask, etc.) within the 24 hours, and produced an incredible project that defied expectations. And of course, there’s also FLOORPLAN, which won the inaugural birmingHack and additionally Majestic’s category for the “Surprise Us!” category. They also let us know that they got published in the SIGBOVIK proceedings for 2025 with FLOORPLAN!
If you want to see some of the other projects that were submitted, you can see them here: https://birminghack.devpost.com/project-gallery
birmingHack was in incredibly high demand when tickets were released - in the first hour and a half all 100 tickets had sold out, with an additional 150 people on the waiting list. I do apologise if you were one of those people who were on the waiting list but couldn’t go this year - but I hope we’ll see you next year! There was no doubt that we saw the success of birmingHack, and so did the School of CS, who will be welcoming a second iteration sometime next year.
In our AGM, we also passed an amendment adding the role of the Hackathons Officer, so if you enjoyed birmingHack and want to help organise an even better follow-up to the debut event, or you’re passionate about hackathons and want to get yourself involved with birmingHack, this is the perfect role for you! Keep an eye out for the EGM that elects this role early next year, around the time of October/November.
Thank you to each and every committee member of CSS who helped make this event possible - and thank you as well to Adam, an external volunteer from hackSheffield who eagerly volunteered to help ensure the event went smoothly!
Outside of Events - Discord and Minecraft
As we kick off the summer holidays, we’ve also been working on things for you to do with the rest of the CSS community if you need time to kill.
First of all, as it was voted on in our AGM, we’ve allowed for members to select what colour they come up as on Discord! Whilst you’re able to continue being the old-fashioned green you know and love, you can also select other colours that you may prefer.
If you haven’t become a member on our Discord server yet, you can use /makemember to give yourself the Member role, or
if you even aren’t part of the Discord server, you can join our community over at https://cssbham.com/discord!
However, if you have a friend who isn’t a member but wants to get involved, then we’ve still got plenty going on. We’ve added two new channels for you to enjoy, the first being the #activities channel, where you can start Discord activities to play with other server members. We’ve currently got a Wordle streak of 20 days, but it’s not just Wordle being played; you can do the daily sudoku, build a farm, race each other, fight each other in a suspiciously blocky FPS game, anything that comes up on Discord!
And last but not least for our Discord server, we’ve added a new opt-in channel, the #pets🐶 channel! If you need a bit of extra serotonin to get you through the summer, server members have started posting their pets in this channel. You can access this channel through the #roles channel, clicking on the “Pets” reaction to get the respective role that shows the channel.
If you’re not a big Discord user though, we have something else for you - our newly re-opened Minecraft server, running the Craftoria modpack! Craftoria has a bit of everything, from modern tech mods like Create to magic mods, such as Ars Nouveau, but also decoration/building mods, such as Handcrafted and MrCrayfish’s Furniture Mod. We’ve also enabled voice chat on the server, so you can talk to other players in real-time.
As part of preparing the server for release, we decided to recreate the Computer Science building using all the new blocks Craftoria added, depicting different rooms such as UG04, Sloman Lounge, the ESO and even some of the individual offices. You can join the server at mc.cssbham.com using Craftoria 1.21.3, and grab the Minecraft role on Discord to access the Minecraft-Discord bridge chat. We look forward to seeing you there!
Memberships
And of course, last but not least - how did we do for memberships this year? It’s been included in previous end of year newsletters, so you bet I’m including it in this as well.
We start off with the all-too-familiar graph, which you can see for yourself at https://cssbham.com/membership-stats:
For this year of 2024/25, we’ve hit a total of 513 members - a massive number that obliterates our previous membership records by over 100! Every time I come back to this number, it terrifies me to think we’ve got 513 unique students who are part of CSS, which we can’t even fit into a single lecture hall. Compared to other societies as well, we are the 3rd largest Guild society in the university, just behind the incredible ACS and ISOC.
It’s been an incredible pleasure to represent each and every one of you, and I hope you felt welcome into one of the largest communities here at UoB.
On that note as well, if you’re a student returning next year, then the Guild is allowing you to renew your membership early this year! In case you missed it or simply forgot, you can go to https://cssbham.com/join and renew your membership for 2025/26 today. The Guild is additionally running a competition for societies to get the most membership renewals, so if you want us to use the winning funds to continue putting on big events such as birmingHack, providing members with discounted entry and supplying you with more free pizza, let your friends know to get their memberships renewed today!
As a thank you for renewing your membership, we’ll also be offering free ducks (whilst stocks last), or a TeX sticker of your choice in case you missed one this year! Don’t worry if you can’t collect your duck or sticker until after the summer; we can hand them out when you return during Freshers’ week or Week 1.
You don’t have to just renew your membership just for the sake of a new shirt or discounted events either - but to also welcome in the next generation of CS students or those interested in the subject, giving them a place to feel home when they may feel nervous about starting university. The Guild offered me to do an interview on renewing your membership a while ago, which you can find here, where I go into a bit more detail about how renewing a membership may not just benefit you, but also those around you.
Going Forward
As I finish off this newsletter and thus our reflection of CSS’ second semester, I’d like the opportunity to look to the future of CSS.
Like plenty of other members who joined university when we started recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, I will be graduating this year, with my Integrated Master’s degree on the 15th of July. However, over the last 4 years of my time at university, CSS has always been the highlight of it all, providing a space to meet new people, putting on exciting events that allow us to laugh the night away and forget all the chaos that may be occurring in the ever-changing world. Even with how prevalent change can be though, especially in a rapidly evolving and growing field like Computer Science, there is always some comfort to be sought in things that remain consistent - and for me, one of those things has been CSS.
Although its future is now out of my hands and left to Matty and the rest of the elected 2025/26 committee, I trust that they will rise to the challenge and continue to provide a community away from home, running a mixture of fun and industrial events that you are always welcome to no matter the circumstances. With that, I would like to bid the best of luck to the incoming committee for the next academic year - whether you are a returning face to the committee page or a brand new one, this is the perfect time to expand your skills and support a society that has helped kick off your time at university!
And of course, I can’t forget the committee I had the honour of leading throughout 2024/25 - there was a unique spark that shone in each of you every moment I worked with you. It’s an understatement to simply say I am proud of each and every one of you, to the point where not only do I consider you as colleagues, but as some of the best friends I’ve ever met during university, who’ve stuck by my side through the thick and thin of running the society. I’d like to give a massive thank you to all of you for everything you’ve done, and the best of luck wherever you go next - whether you’ll still continue being part of CSS Committee, graduating and starting a new job, or doing something else altogether. I’m hoping the experiences you’ve had this year will follow you wherever you go in life, allowing you to re-apply skills that you’ve learned and positive memories to recall when you too reflect on what you’ve done this year.
I’d like to give one final thank you to everyone for having me as your President of CSS for 2024/25 - it was a journey I never dreamed of taking when I first started university, but one I thoroughly enjoyed after I made the choice to run for the role in March 2024. You’ve all given me the opportunity to push my limits, test my skills in leadership and organisation, and meet so many people from the many diverse backgrounds of CS that make the field what it is today - I have no regrets choosing to take this journey. Although I’ll no longer be at UoB and working in London, I’ll still do my best to keep in touch through the Discord server or coming to major events, such as the Christmas Meal or the Ball, since CSS became such a big part of my life and I want to continue watching it grow after my departure.
Regardless, I have rambled on enough, and after two years of being CSS committee and four years of university, I need a long rest. If you’re graduating on the 15th of July, I hope to see some of you there, otherwise, I’d like to wish all of you the best of luck with University, your jobs, and your future!
Best Regards,
Holly Packer
CSS President, on behalf of CSS Committee
Before we finish off, we also have an industrial opportunity for those graduating between 2026 and 2029 - our friends at The Trade Desk have organised an Open House event for the summer!
The Trade Desk is a media buying platform that use complex data algorithms to connect advertisers with their audiences at an unprecedented scale.
Picture this… millions of online ad auctions happening every second, and we’re right in the midst of it, ensuring that the right ads reach the right people at the perfect moment. We’re talking about a massive volume of data — 120TB of it, to be exact-generated every single day. That’s a trillion queries processed daily.
Ever wondered what it’s like to work at a world leading programmatic advertising technology company? Now’s your chance to step inside The Trade Desk and see for yourself! Join them for an exciting Open House event where you’ll meet the brilliant minds behind their cutting-edge technology and learn what makes them tick.
- Dive into the world of advertising tech and discover how they’re shaping the future.
- Chat with their employees, learn about their culture, and see why they love what they do.
- Enjoy tasty bites and drinks, soak in the office vibes, and take home an exclusive swag pack!
This open house event targets students currently pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree, and plan to graduate between 2026 and 2029.
Event details:
- Tuesday 15th July 2025 at 5pm - 7pm (London time).
- Held in their office at One Bartholomew Close, London, EC1A 7BL.
- You can sign up here: https://app7.greenhouse.io/e/pkssta
The spaces for this event will be limited, and further details will be sent to shortlisted students via email.
Thank you once again to The Trade Desk for letting us know about this opportunity, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your summer!