Thanks to Professor Diane Horton, I’ve been recognized as a woman making a difference at the University of Toronto!  My profile has been posted here!

I’d just like to thank everybody who dropped by our Department of Computer Science booth on Saturday, for this year’s University of Toronto Fall Campus Day event! It was also great to see familiar faces of people who I spoke to at the Ontario University Fair last month — I’m glad you guys came back!!

It was also a great chance to meet this year’s Department of Computer Science (DCS) Ambassadors! I look forward to working with you guys!

That is all for now. :) — I just wanted to give a brief update on what I’ve been up to :D

Yesterday, James and I spent most of the day at Bayview Secondary School.  We were there on behalf of the Department of Computer Science, and our main job was to educate the high school students about what exactly computer science is, and what kind of experience they can get at the University of Toronto.

We presented to four different classes, two of which were computer science classes, and the rest were computer engineering classes.  The students ranged from grade 10 to grade 12.  So James and I had to make slight changes to the content of our presentation to suit each class and grade.  Overall, the presentations went very well, but both James and I were so familiar with our presentation by the end of the day, we could no longer tell whether or not it was as informative as we wanted it to be.  But I hope that we still got our main messages across.

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Yesterday was another busy day at the University of Toronto.  The Department of Computer Science hosts a ShowCaSe competition every year, and I got a chance to volunteer at this year’s event.  The competition is essentially a chance for high school students to demo projects that they’ve done at school.  Things ranged from games the students programmed, to things like attaching a webcam to remote control cars.  All of the ambassadors and faculty members were amazed at the work done by these high school students!  I wish I had more time to play around with these projects, but I had to give Bahen tours.  But congratulations to the winners once again!  I’m sure they’ll have an awesome time at AutoDesk!

In addition to the ShowCaSe competition that was held in the morning, the Department of Computer Science also had an Open House in the afternoon.  This Open House was slightly different than the March Break Open House we had a few weeks ago.  Read the rest of this entry »

As of last fall, I’ve joined the Department of Computer Science (DCS) Ambassadors team.  The DCS Ambassador program is a volunteer program where a team of undergraduate (and some graduate) students help the department out at various events.  In the next month or so, I’ll be helping out at:

• March 20th – University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science Open House
• March 27th – A prospective student will be visiting (hunting around for the right university)
• April 4th – ShowCaSe Competition & Open House
• Sometime in May – Gr8 Designs for Gr8 Girls Event 

On top of that, James and I have been working very hard in putting together a presentation for our high school visits.  We will be heading out to high schools to tell them about how great computer science is!  Our goal is to educate high school students about what computer science is about, and what kind of experiences they could get at the University of Toronto.

Yesterday, James and I gave Diane a run-through of our presentation.  We got a few more suggestions from her and some of our peers.  Now, we will start contacting high schools to see if anybody is interested.

James also created a really cool Photosynth of Bahen (our computer science building — our home away from home during the school year).  Check it out, it’s really cool!