Inaugural CSE Forum

This morning I had to get up early to go to Uni to play squash with Rose and Angie. I caught the 9am bus into town with Rose and we met Angie when we got there. Angie had booked the court for an hour so we thought we’d just play until someone else kicked us out. It was my first time playing squash for a while so I was a little worried that my game wouldn’t be quite up to par. We took turns playing each other and it was a pretty good workout. I even wore proper sports shoes this time as well, since last time I wore my Cotton On shoes and they weren’t the best to run around in.

After the next people to book the court arrived, Angie left us to go to her class while Rose and I had lunch together. An old friend Si-yu joined us coincidentally as well. He was the guy who played squash with us that one time a while ago. I didn’t have any lunch prepared today so I thought I’d splash out and buy some food from the quad, though everything there is too expensive!

After lunch I realised that all three lectures I had today were in the same lecture theatre and they were all scheduled one after the other. The first lecture we had was ELECTENG 209, the design paper. We had a special guest lecturer from the library who taught us about the library searching system and how to look for resources properly. It was pretty similar to the introductory lecture we had last year when we were introduced to the library catalogue for the first time. Our second lecture was Electromagnetics with Dr Smaill, and we continued the work we were doing with charges and electric fields. One of the formulae we derived was the electric potential for a point charge, and when we came to the final result Dr Smaill referred to the formula as being “beautiful”. Then he told us that we were going to prove the formula was right and said,

Being correct is important too, perhaps almost as important as being beautiful. -Dr Chris Smaill

I thought that was pretty funny when he said that. It reminded me of a few things that I probably shouldn’t mention here. After my last lecture I caught the bus home with Rose and prepared to get ready to go back into Uni because tonight we hosted the first Computer Systems Forum for students of our department.

I arrived back at Uni in the car just before 6 and headed to the AUSA Functions Room where the forum was being held. I didn’t really know how many students to expect; I emailed all the second year students last night to remind them about it but I’m not sure how many of them actually remembered about it. At first there weren’t too many students and most of them were Part 3 and 4 students, but slowly more people started to arrive before we were split into table groups around the room.

The first CSE forum of its kind!

The purpose of the evening was pretty much to discuss some key issues about the Computer Systems specialisation and talk about ways in which we can make our degree program engaging and appealing to prospective students and future employers. We wanted to come up with ways to make our degree more visible to others in an attempt to combat the dipping student enrolment numbers. At our table there were mostly second year students but we also had a fourth year student to sort of facilitate the discussion at our table. We each had to fill in a short questionnaire answering questions about why we like Computer Systems and what we’d like to get out of the degree.

After all the semi-formal things were out of the way, we were treated to some pizza and drinks. Actually there were heaps of pizzas! I think they were expecting a bigger turn out. But I didn’t mind, at least that meant more pizza for me . I had a chat with a few new people who I had seen around the place before but never actually talked to so that was nice. Overall I think it wasn’t too bad an event. I was speaking with a couple of second year students and they agreed with the idea of organising a get-together for just the second year Computer Systems students so that we get to know one another. It’s sometimes hard to pick out the CSE students from the group because we’re always mixed in with all the Electrical students!