Anappetite: Experiences and Food from a Student

Every year around June, IKEA hosts a Midsummer Buffet full of fish, meatballs, salad, and more. You have to be an IKEA Family member (which is free) and buy a $25 ticket in person on a previous day. I attended the Calgary buffet, and here is my full review!

Fall CPSC 231 (Intro to CS with Python), Required - This course was a nice introduction to the basics of programming with Python. It was fairly easy for me since I had some prior experience with coding, but I think it would be manageable for beginners too. The only downside was that the assignments were graded by a computer program, so even a minor mistake like a typo or a missing comma could lower your mark significantly. I heard that this course is better organized and taught than CPSC 217, which is the online version of it. I would give this course a 7/10 because it was good but not very challenging. PHIL 279 (Logic and Proofs), Required - This course was pretty interesting and different. It teaches you how to use logic and mathematical symbols to construct and evaluate arguments, and it required a certain way of thinking that was not intuitive at first. I took the online assessment version of the course, which gave me more flexibility but also required more self-disci...

While this isn’t quite a tech blog, this post should have some important insights for any UCalgary students interested in a tech career. After seeing that  Jeff Nguyen , a recruiter in the student space, founder of BobaTalks (which provides free mentorship for students), and prolific "LinkedInfluencer" (the good kind) was going to have a booth at  CalgaryHacks 2025 , I knew I had to reach out. As someone deeply involved in both student mentorship and tech recruiting, he seemed like the perfect person to chat with about student recruiting, starting with how UCalgary students can stand out in the job market.  Q: UCalgary has good computer science courses and fantastic clubs. Even so, many students here find it tough to break into big or even mid-sized tech companies because there's not a lot of direct access to recruiters. What's your take on the best way for students in a market like ours to get noticed? Jeff : I believe that computer science is one of those fields wh...