Imagine you have an idea for a piece of software. Let us say it is an app to find the most efficient route between your classes. You spend the weekend working on your idea. After some long nights, scribbled designs on paper and a dozen crushed Red Bulls in the garbage, you run it and it works!

Hearing about your success, friends come asking to try out this app. You then explain, “To get the app to work, I had to do a bunch of rough estimates of the distance between buildings and rooms”. For them to be able to use your app, they must put in what classes they are taking, where the classes are, and the rough distances between each location. That is very time-consuming and a lot of work.

Now imagine a world where you make your app, you plug it into an existing UWindsor Open Data API, and all the users must do is sign in and put in which classes they are taking. The rest is handled by the UWindsor Open Data API.

Open Data or an Open Data Initiative (or Policy) is a service that a group provides that gives their data as data sets or an API to be easily accessible by the public.

Right about now, you may be asking, “Why do I care? What does it mean for me?” That is a particularly good question. Open Data lets us create tools that we have not even thought of yet.

The University of Waterloo has an Open Data Initiative, and they have a tremendous number of apps made by students. The point is empowering students to create exactly what they want, how they want, with amazing tools.

Do you want an Open Data Initiative at the University of Windsor? CSS agrees! Now how do you get it? Well, you can help CSS convince the university to create this initiative. If interested, send an email to css@uwindsor.ca and let us know exactly how much you want it.

If you want to read more about it, you can read our proposal.

Internships. We all want one to get experience. Some of us get interviews and some don’t. Everyday students at the university are constantly applying to various internships either through coop or their own personal websites to land an interview. These internships might be with big companies or even smaller upcoming companies.

The one question that we always ask is why it is so hard to get an internship. Sometimes it's because of the work that the company might be doing that they need someone who is a perfect fit, other times it might be because our application does not parse well.

Regardless of the reason, we push forward and continue to apply to various postings of various companies. Some tips that I thought could help with the grind for internships would be the following.

Number one: make sure to first connect with someone that works as a University Recruiter for the company you are applying for because your resume will most likely land on their table.

Next would be to keep applying even if you don’t have all the skills that are stated in the job description, most of the time companies will teach you the skills regardless of experience.

The final tip would be that you don’t feel defeated if you get a rejection, move on and continue to apply to various other postings. Remember that all you need is one internship to swing open the door to other internships and connections.

I hope these tips help to make the internship grind a bit easier. If you need assistance with your resume or preparing for interviews, the CSS has many resources available to you on their website, YouTube channel and discord server! Also feel free to contact me via discord if you want a personal resume critique or need some questions answered about the job market.

Thanks for reading!

Have you heard of 6 degrees of separation before? It describes how anyone can be connected to anyone with 6 people in between. You technically are hitting it off with Bill Gates. Pretty much best friends with Elon Musk.

Well now we will get to test this through the only means we have. WIKIPEDIA!

On February 18th, we will be hosting a Wikipedia race for the UWindsor Computer Science Society. Currently we are aiming to host this event in-person, but nothing has been finalized and whether it is online or in person is still up in the air. We will be finding out how on Earth Shaquille O’ Neil is related to the Theory of Relativity and how Pizza Hut is related to Google.

Come on out for a night of fun and wiki races! More information is to come. Please keep an eye on the Discord server for new information and sign-ups.