And so, yet another year has passed… With the recent exit of 2015, we couldn’t help but reminisce, so we thought we’d jump on the bandwagon and release our own recap! So here it is, a whistle-stop tour of only some of the highlights of Autumn term 2015!

Freshers’ Fair

Everyone knows the year truly begins with the Freshers’ Fair! We spent the weekend camped out in the exceedingly crowded cloisters, meeting lots of future members, playing with BB8, and of course, handing out our bags of swag.

BB8 nestled amongst our TechSoc swag at the stall

Scavenger Hunt

To celebrate the start of the year, we went on a scavenger hunt! We fought for balloons, stole headbands and got up to a lot of mischief to win those precious points. Someone even made a video of it all, so our embarrassments can be forever remembered!

The blue team at the Scavenger Hunt

Local Hack Day

Next, we hosted UCL’s first ever Local Hack Day, in association with Major League Hacking! About 100 students gathered in Malet Place Engineering Building, and spent twelve hours learning new skills along with over 70 other universities and schools across the globe. Read more about it in our dedicated blog post.

A happy crowd at Local Hack Day 2015

Workshops

We’re all about the learning here at TechSoc, and we launched straight into workshops last term! We started by munching our way through HTML, CSS, jQuery and Ruby on Rails with Hugo in Coding and Cookies and 3D modelling with Jack Adler in Blender and Brownies.

We even had some really active members step up to the plate and run their own! COMP1001: Computer Architecture, the much-beloved and sorely-missed module formerly offered to first-year Computer Scientists, was revived by Chris Hammond. We also saw Horatiu and Jaromir run some very helpful sessions for Algorithms in C, everyone’s favourite low-level language.

Coding and Cookies Blender and Brownies Hardware and Chill

(A massive thank you to all of our workshop leads for their efforts this term!)

Projects

The revival of TechSoc projects was both long-awaited and highly-welcomed by the society, with lots of people getting involved to work on our Android, VR and web development projects!

We’ve had a great time developing the virtual reality game which is almost ready to release to the world! People from different levels were able to take part and lots of beginners were able to apply their modelling skills from Blender and Brownies to create some really cool assets in the game.

Android Project VR Project

We’ll be holding a session soon where everyone can try out our VR game - keep an eye out for details!

The Android project was equally successful with a strong turnout every week. We split into teams and worked on different parts of the application and whether you were designing the UI, writing API calls or setting up the cloud infrastructure, we hope everyone learned a lot. The app will be released upon completion!

Tech Talks

If there’s one thing you can’t say we didn’t have enough of this term, it has to be tech talks. We were joined by engineers from a great line up of companies to talk about lots of interesting topics.

Google Blackrock Bloomberg

  • Google - Building Location-based Services
  • Kano Computing - Building a Computer that Anyone Can Make
  • Bloomberg - Super-scale Mobile Applications
  • Credit Suisse - Python: The Big Picture
  • Blackrock - Large-scale Data Science with Spark and Hadoop
  • Zappar - Augmented Reality
  • MWR - Introduction to Information Security
  • KPMG - Psychology of Information Security and Demystifying Advanced Persistent Threats

Phew, what a list!

Ask the Interns

Term 1 is the season to start internship-hunting, so we rounded up 6 of our very own students who have interned at Google, Facebook, CERN, Bloomberg, Credit Suisse and startups to share some of their experiences and pearls of wisdom with our members who are setting off on their own journeys. We had some great questions from the audience and look forward to seeing some of them as part of the panel in years to come!

Our savvy members hearing from Aleks about his internship at CERN

Ask the Alumni

We held our first alumni event in partnership with the UCL Computer Science department, two talks and a panel, with some of our distinguished alumni, including Joe Nicholson, ex-COO of ION Trading, Richard Bravery, EMEA Director in BlackRock, and Daniele Quercia.

Palantir Office Tour

Towards the end of November, 30 of our members were selected for a UCL visit to Palantir’s Lord Of The Rings’ themed offices in Soho. We got to learn a lot about the work Palantir does with their data analysis tools, and chatted with their QEs over a scrumptious dinner.

King Office Tour

King kindly opened the doors to their offices (just around the corner from UCL) to 60 TechSoc members for a night! The evening started with an insightful talk on big data from Vince Darley, their Chief Data Scientist, and we also got to chat to some of the staff. Our hosts were very generous: there was A LOT of pizza to be had and also plenty to do.

A group of members and King developers chatting away at their offices

Volunteering

Not only do we cater for our lovely TechSoc members, but we decided to give back to the wider community by starting the TechSoc Volunteering Crew. We wanted to share our passion for technology with those who may not have access to it and we’ve had great results so far. We have 100 members on the group and have volunteered at multiple events, most recently CoderDojo at UCL to inspire young girls to get into programming.

We also organised our own Hour of Code sessions for children. We visited St Michael’s Primary School and Camden School for Girls, and we taught them how to code with Scratch and the Engduinos.

If you want to join the Volunteering Crew, join our Facebook group! It’s a great initiative and we would love your support.

Socials

The TechSoc social calendar has been great so far! We’ve had TechSoc Tuesdays throughout the first half of term and even a mini bar-crawl edition, where we still ended up going to a UCLU bar at the end of night in search for pitchers of tequila!

One of our bigger social events was the Winter Mixer, in collaboration with Imperial’s DoCSoc, where we had a great turnout and it was great to meet other students in London who were studying similar subjects!

In our alternative to most student balls, we had a Winter Dinner with the Leading Women Society at Number Twelve Restaurant, with invited guests from companies we had partnered with over the term, such as Credit Suisse.

Winter Dinner

The last social of the term was the Ugly Jumper Christmas Social - definitely a highlight of the social calendar - where most students put on their wonderful christmas jumpers in aim to win the rather amusing prizes we had picked out for them.

Crowd at the Christmas Jumper Social

It was a great end to the term, and there will be many more exciting events to come in the New Year, stay tuned and it will be great to see more of you at the socials!

Coming up

Now that’s all done (and we are firmly past the holiday), we hope you’re just as excited as we are for what we have coming up in Term 2! There’ll be more tech talks, events, projects, workshops and not one, but two (and a half) hackathons. We also have Tech Night coming up, and the Kano University Competition - a chance for university students across the UK to impact the next generation through a Raspberry Pi powered, DIY computer for kids.

Join us this friday for an awesome night and let’s catch up!

— The TechSoc Committee