At the end of Spring 2024 (the end of my Freshman year), I pitched my application to the WiCS board to be their website administrator. I mainly wanted practice building a website, but I also mentioned my previous experience teaching and leading others in app development. I was passionate about getting more students technical.

After my presentation, Nandana and Jelena, the co-presidents of WiCS at the time, saw a new opportunity to use my skills that I hadn't anticipated. They were the ones who truly kickstarted the Dev Project.

I had anticipated a few technical workshops -- she imagined a whole cohort of students who would build a big project over one semester. Nandana wanted people to get their hands dirty with web development. It's safe to say that much of WiCS:Wired Dev Project can credit itself to her ambition.

The first semester, we threw out a poster and an interest form in the CS Lounge and Instagram. It said something like, "Interested in building a CS project for 1 hour each week with other students? Sign up here." We had over 80+ applicants in the span of 2 weeks.

That's when I saw two things: Students want to build. And students want to build in community.

From then on, the dev project has grown into an amazing opportunity for students to grow confidence in their development skills, get practice working on teams, get exposed to actual git version control outside of the classroom, and step up into leadership positions. We've had dev mentors (dev members who were part of previous cohorts) lead sessions for fellow members. We've seen students jump in to provide technical help on Discord while my co-lead and I were AWOL.

My mind has truly been blown away by the level of passion and enthusiasm to learn displayed by the UIC CS community.

And I have no doubt the Dev Project will continue to grow in tremendous ways as long as people keep wanting to build.

Lots of love,
Flori (August 12, 2027)

• Weekly 1.5 hour meetings (attendance is tracked)
• Weekly tasks (submissions are tracked)
• 1-2 hours of independent work outside of meetings
• Communication through Dev Project Discord Server
• A final, deployed product to add to your resume
• End-of-semester demo
• Skills learned: Intro to Web Dev, HTML, CSS, JS, Git Version Control, CLI Commands