Message From Leadership

Director Undergraduate Program: Dr. Radana Dvorak

Welcome to the summer term, week 3, and the new academic year! To our new STC students, I am extending a special greeting and invite you to join one (or more) of the exciting activities that we offer to help our students further their experiences at CityU. 

In the Winter Term 2021 STC Thursday Byte, Dean Chung wrote about the importance of your capstone project and the need to start thinking about it as soon as you start taking your first courses at STC. I followed up on his theme writing about being strategic in planning your career, the importance of finding your passion, and using the capstone project to showcase your knowledge and interests in interviews. Often students ask me, “where do I find some ideas similar to my interest areas”? A great question! Here are several resources I have provided students over the years.  

GitHub Final Year Projects 

“Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects” from Communications of the ACM July 2021 

GitHub Computer Science Projects 

Zooniverse – people-powered crowdsourcing research in almost every discipline you can think of – art, language, climate, biology, social science, etc.; there are hundreds of research initiatives currently underway. Perhaps you can develop a tool to help one of the projects you are interested in. 

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Have an awesome summer quarter! 

Events

Club Announcements

  • STC Cybersecurity Club
Consider joining the Cybersecurity club weekly team meeting. They provide learning opportunities and technical skill development.  Students and alumni are welcome! See the flyer for a list of topics/skillsets we will cover during Summer Quarter. Click this Teams link to join the meeting every Thursday at 5:30 p.m. PST.
 
  • STC Tech Club

The STC Tech Club meet every Thursday from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM (PDT) via Teams: STC Tech Club Weekly Meeting – Summer Quarter. For students or faculty who would like to present, choose a date, and upload your presentation here.

 

Invited Talk: COL Scott Nelson

Cybersecurity and Information Warfare 

The United States is engaged in the greatest global power competition in our history. Cyber is the global nervous system, which places many of our US institutions at risk. Successful competition requires a more dynamic, holistic view of information and cybersecurity and a close partnership between government, private industry, and academia. Learn what your role is to strengthen these partnerships.

When: Wednesday, August 11 4:00 PM PST

Where: Zoom (Meeting ID: 937 415 6794)

Click here for more information

Career Tips

Questions YOU Ask in an Interview are Critical. 

Hear the story how Joseph lost the job interview due to being poorly prepared with questions to ask during the interview. Don’t underestimate the importance of the questions you could easily have written down and brought in with your other important documents (resumes, cover letter). 

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This Week in Tech History July 19th – July 23rd

The Unholy Alliance is Born, July 22, 1980 

Representatives from an IBM facility in Boca Raton, Florida, where a small group of engineers were secretly developing the IBM PC, meet with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft to discuss licensing software and an operating system for the still-developing PC. Not having an operating system to offer IBM, Microsoft will eventually buy the rights to QDOS/86-DOS from Seattle Computing Products, which they in-turn license to IBM as PC-DOS, and later license to PC clone makers as MS-DOS. This alliance between IBM and Microsoft forms one of the most dominant platforms in the history of computing, which goes on to crush nearly all other PC platforms in the 80’s and 90’s. Ironically this platform nearly crushes IBM itself as they lost control of the platform to PC clone makers and Microsoft. 

Tech Humor