Working on his Mac, he offered me a seat. The room was meticulously organized; books neatly piled into stacks and a list of events organized by the Computer Science Association on the white-board. The dedication of Jaspreet Singh, the coordinator of CSA, is self-evident. When asked about how the “coordinator experience” has been, he mentioned that a lot of the work for the events is done by the third-years themselves and their hard-work has clearly borne fruit.

CSA is organizing eight events for Apogee this year (some of them a combined effort with other clubs); the International Coding League, the Voot Hackothon, MatheMagic, and Anticoding are some of the key events. While they mainly act as a publicity arm for the CS Department pre-Apogee, the club also organizes a tech quiz called MindTurner and the Alumni Research Talks in collaboration with Embryo. However, the majority of their work is done for and during Apogee.

Due to the popularity of competitive coding events in other technical fests, the CoStAA is particularly keen on ensuring the success of ICL. Previously it was organized by ACM alone while CSA had their own independent competition – CodeStorm. However, Jaspreet elucidated that to drive up competition and unify participation across the events, CSA has decided to work together with ACM this year to make ICL a competition synonymous with Apogee. He went on to describe the other events hosted by CSA. When he reached the Voot Hackathon, he was enlivened. The hackathon boasts a  whopping sixty thousand rupees prize pool this iteration and he hopes that this will drive up participation as last year there were only a meagre fifteen submissions for it. My interest was piqued when he began describing Anticoding; a rather bizarre but nonetheless fun event with rules such as “No using arithmetic operators” and where code is judged on unusual parameters such as shortest code length. When asked what events are organized for participants that aren’t inclined towards coding, he smiled and replied that the event Qrious was created with that very audience in mind. It’s a pictionary-like quiz where participants have to guess a hidden phrase after being shown a tech-related picture. When I enquired how the events have evolved over the years, he rocked his chair back, murmured “tricky question” and said that they have gone from being trivial programming events to highly competitive competitions that draw a multitude of participants. The Press wishes Jaspreet and the rest of the CSA the best of luck in their endeavour to make Apogee a success.