The House of Appropriations Committee (HAC) discussed Bill 19-08 with the intent to end communication stigmas within the Computer Science Department during their Sept. 30 meeting.
Bryn Loftness, President of the Computer Science club at Colorado Mesa University (CMU), presented the bill for her organization. Bill 19-08 requested the House of Appropriations committee transfer $520 from the SCRF fund to the Computer Science club to cover less than half of the expenses involved with the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
Loftness explained that ICPC is a multi-tiered computer programming competition that gathered over 50,000 participants this year and continues to grow in popularity.
The Computer Science Department will take three teams of three and go to Baylor University to compete with other established universities like Colorado School of Mines. These nine CMU students will be mostly juniors and seniors.
“This is a major where a lot of students come from nothing. A degree where you can go from nothing to everything in,” Loftness said.
The Computer Science club will provide $59 for each competitor from CMU, and the club requested the House to cover the other $57 needed per person. The participants will still have other expenses they must pay for on their own.
“ICPC is a huge team-building opportunity. A lot of times there is a stigma that is true and not true sometimes within the computer science department that we don’t communicate as much as we should, and this is an opportunity that we really love to do. Partner programming, to make sure that we foster that communication, and that we really can think through and talk through our algorithms that we are implementing,” Loftness said.
The competition is fast paced. Starting Friday Oct. 25, the nine student competitors will travel to Golden, Colorado for a pre-programming opportunity to meet new people. The next day, there will be five hours of competition, rewards and activities. Then on Sunday, the three teams will travel back to CMU.
The Computer Science club has not started fundraising this semester. “We are going to solidify it this next meeting. Meetings are every Friday and execs meet every Tuesday, but we are planning to start selling come November,” Loftness said.
The club plans to sell t-shirts, water bottles, stickers and whiteboard notebooks. The money raised will be put toward an in-house coding competition the club plans to host in the future.
House Representative Mahalet Mamo asked “When you do the in-house competition, do you think you will come to us and ask for money?” Loftness answered this with a yes; the club plans to ask for $5 to $10 dollars per CMU student enrolled in the competition.
“I think this contest is a really good way to embrace what it might be like as a job in the future […] This contest is a really good way for students on campus to get that experience and to start networking and marketing their name with different people and companies. I think this a really good opportunity for these nine people,” House Representative Karson Fye said.
With the eight representatives voting yes, Bill 19-08 passed for $520 to go to the Computer Science club.
In other news, Daniel Haas from the Senate was inducted into the HAC on Wednesday Sept. 25. Now all representative positions in the HAC are filled.
