University of Queensland Computing Society

26/03/2020

As someone who spent the past five years getting my software engineering degree from UQ, I saw a fair few student societies. The computing society was hands down my favourite.

When I first joined UQCS I was just starting my second year of engineering. I skipped a lecture to show up to a presentation from some Atlassian employees on how to use git. A few years later I gave them my own spin on the git talk to a fresh bunch of first and second years.

Being a UQCS member really helped me build my professional network up from nothing. I got my first real industry related job as a tutor through people that I met in the UQCS slack. I can go into #webdev on slack and bounce my weird ideas off of high quality industry professionals working at Google and Microsoft and the like for free. I even get to share the #c and #rust channels with high quality embedded systems engineers and kernel developers.

For all that UQCS has given me, I'm really proud that I'm able to give back to the society now. Clear Sky Genomics might not be a big name company, but I'm now one of the alumni giving advice to bright-eyed young students. I also really enjoyed spending a year on the committee (taxing as it was) and helping to organise events and sponsors for the year.

So if you're reading this, and I've managed to interest you in UQCS, awesome! It'd be really cool if you were to join the society, or convince your workplace to sponsor them so you can get access to rooms full of grads like me.