IEEE University of Toronto Student Branch

MakeUofT - MakeUofT is Canada’s largest hardware-focused hackathon that brings together students for a weekend, providing them with abundant access to state-of-the-art hardware, mentorship, 3D printing and tools that would be typically expensive to obtain. This year, MakeUofT hosted over 230 participants and provided them with over $2,600 worth of brand-new hardware and tools, along with IEEE UofT’s existing hardware. Participants were also able to network with company representatives from Alphawave Semi during their company-led Arduino workshop, IEEE Young Professionals, and Marvell Technology through an inaugural pop-up event where participants searched for items in the event venue to win prizes from Marvell.

Technical Interview Night - Technical Interview Night is an evening designed to develop nearly 100 students’ soft skills, such as interviewing and networking. The event boasted mock technical interviews, networking booths, a Leetcode learning booth and resume reviews. University of Toronto Engineering alumni, along with working professionals from companies like Red Hat, IBM, and Huawei led mock 1-on-1 interviews with students to pose hardware and software questions with an open discussion for feedback afterwards. 34 working professionals attended the event, which concurrently ran company booths, with industry guests from Alphawave Semi, TELUS, and Synopsys. A notable accomplishment was our first-time partnership with TELUS, marking the beginning of a long-term collaboration as they continue to support our future events. Following Technical Interview Night, TELUS showed their unwavering support for IEEE UofT as they attended NewHacks, our beginner-friendly 48-hour hackathon.

Hack the Student Life - This school year, we held the second iteration of Hack the Student Life. This day-long hackathon event partners with Amazon Web Services. 80 students had the exclusive opportunity to work out of the Amazon Web Services Toronto Office to tackle challenges proposed by the University of Toronto faculty. Participants were challenged to build projects using AWS Cloud Solutions to solve one of 5 challenge areas. These challenge statements were identified by Student Housing & Residence Experience, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, The Centre for Analytics and AI Engineering, and Institute of Biomedical Engineering. Students were able to receive direct mentorship from AWS Solution Architects in the office to prepare their projects for a presentation in front of a panel of judges. The winning team was invited to advance their project alongside University of Toronto faculty and contribute to its real-world implementation.