Setting up my own society

In September, I started my third year at the University not knowing how different would it be from the two previous ones.

Becoming a Junior Honours student means that we no longer have the liberty of trying out several outside courses, we do not score points just by showing up at tutorials and even the brightest of us cannot study few days before the exams to be sure of a pass. Now all the topics we cover are much more detailed than before and we are expected to systematically prepare for all our lectures. On the other hand, in past years a lot of the material we covered was rather bland. That is certainly not the case this year.

In Topics of Microeconomics, for example, we analyse mathematical models and their application in auctions, bargaining or situations of asymmetric information. A good change this year that we are encouraged to bring our own independent learning to the problems we do in classes, which is always interesting. We moved from a phase of blindly accepting all the premises and theories in microeconomics into a stage when not everything is black and white.

Despite the increase in workload I try to stay committed to my extracurricular activities like in past years. Albeit coming to all my fencing practices like in the past is not the case for me this year, I am quite happy I did not resign on sports.

In addition, I took upon myself to venture out of my comfort zone and decided to found my own society. Being a member of one is rather common. There are about 240 of them at the University and their focuses range from beading to surfing in the North Sea (yes, even in December. Their commitment is rather impressive).  On the other hand, creating one is a different thing. Since college years I have been trying to learn how to code independently through MOOC courses and eventually by taking up classes under the School of Informatics. Despite not being very good at it, I was quite puzzled why whenever I brought the fact up among friends, everyone was so surprised. It seemed to me that there was a stigma surrounding programming among Economics students and especially among girls. That sparked my interest in creating my own programming society which would teach students from various academic backgrounds coding skills. I teamed up with two informatics and artificial science students and my friend studying the same course as I am and in October we began teaching a small group of our friends how to code in Python. Despite having covered just the basics at this point, it is so rewarding to see people warm up to programming and realise it is not as impenetrable of a discipline as they might have thought. A few days ago, we applied to the Student Union to become a full-fledged society. So, with a bit of luck, in the second semester we will be able to reach out to more people and try to debunk the myth of coding being only for shrewd tech individuals.

 

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