2026 Winter Academic Meeting Minutes

Sun 04 Jan Meeting Minutes

Reviewing T1 & Feedback, Planning T2 Academic Activities

Agenda (Minutes Next Section)

Note:

Only 2 responses in the entire section on academic events, 1 satisfied, 1 neutral, no other comments
From Welcome Week section - Linux Labs praised
RL thoughts:
- Could be worth thinking about general engagement so there's not a potential vicious cycle of not getting engagement/feedback for some events - esp important given we're an academic soc
- However, on personal observation, this should *not- be taken as a condemnation of academic activities - many events I dropped in on were well attended, and there are some people whose only engagement with UWCS may be e.g. through course sessions etc
- At points with some of the course comms, it was quite confused what the details were, and some announcements were left very late, esp on a couple of occasions where details had changed, or sessions had been cancelled
- Would also strongly encourage continuing careers & industry related events - our own sessions, resources etc as well as liasing with the new DCS careers adviser so we have something similar to Sam Merrix
- Also, would be nice to see lightning talks for T2, those are usually well engaged with
- Feel free to give me a shout if you want any extra support/discussions - applies for other roles too, but I get it's potentially hard to decide direction without too much member input

Reflection on positives and negatives from T1 ones
- X-Soc: We had revamped how it was run from last year making it much interactive, had a positive affect on attendance, last years final session had 1 person wheras this years had around 10. Notes for other courses would be to not have a large presentation with no breaks but rather have tasks all throughout the presentation so people arent just sat listening for an hour or longer. Also, for next years course, trying to get a more open room such as lib2 would be better as can more easily help people.
Plans for T2 courses & workshops
Rust Course
- Ed to add this to UWCS website - RL: worth noting https://rs118.uwcs.co.uk/ exists
- Need to find volunteers
Procedural generation workshop
- Not sure if this should be run again - if it does run again, lots of revamp needed
CS259 class test (just a 1 hour session would be good, covering past quizzes)
Cs266 (data analytics) may have a class test again
Revision session plans

Reflection on T1 company events
- iirc turnout and location mostly good, Ab Initio main exception to this
Plans for T2 company events

Event Distrbution:
- Edward Denton - Rust Course (based on previous course, week 2), Procedural Generation Workshop (requires content revamp), Formal Languages Class Test, Data Analytics Class Test (only provide tooling)
- Edward O'D - Lightning talks, Chess Engine Competiton, Poker Night with Poker Soc
Edward and Joseph are interested in helping out in the talks (require volunteers)
DCS is fine with UWCS producing academic resources
Events website deadline: Week 1 events: tmrw. Rest: Term 1

Chess Competiton: ask people to program bots (by week 1) + make real people to play against bots during events
Potential karaoke talks with lecturers
- Reach out to DCS for this to let them know we're interested