TU20 2017 in review

JANUARY—2017 got off to a quick start. We were in the midst of organizing the TU20 cup and were matching TU20 cup mentors with TU20 cup teams. Each team would have at least 4 meetings with their mentors who would provide feedback and guidance to the teams. We knew our TU20 cup teams would create some fantastic projects, but it’s always great to get someone else’s perspective and guidance.

As January continued, we started to see teams building out their projects at their school chapters. The Chapter leaders, Ibrahim, Jordan and Shreyan, were integral to making sure students understood the projects and opportunities TU20 had to offer.

February—teams continued working on their TU20 cup projects up to the last minute (we got business plan proposals at 11:58pm). When the day arrived, we got to witness some awesome presentations and pitches from our 13 competing teams.

We got started with a keynote presentation and then broke teams into two rooms to pitch to the judges.  The top two teams from each room were selected to present in a final round.

After some deliberation, the judges selected Team Apex as the winner with their product, Starspeak. Starspeak focused on helping younger students practice their public speaking with subject and skills based modules. The program would then provide them with feedback to help them improve. Their prize was an opportunity to commercialize their product through the TechIgniters incubator.

Also big congrats to the 2nd and 3rd place teams, Next Gen and Innovate forwards.

Overall, the inaugural TU20 cup was success, and we wanted to thank all the mentors and judges who helped us out.

MARCH— On March 13th we had an opportunity to present at Tech Toronto, a monthly tech meetup with over 700 attendees. We set up a booth during the initial networking time and had the opportunity to share some of our stories with the attendees. It was great to see the interest and support from the tech community!

Later, during the presentation part of the evening, we were featured as the Community Partner of the month and had 30 seconds to share some of our initiatives with the audience and received a warm applause.

On March 23rd we hosted our first innovation night at Apple suites. The innovation night focused on teaching students some key concepts on a monthly topic and then having them apply this knowledge to some real world problems. We had Chris Herbert present about relationship building networking and worked through some scenario problems. We haven’t had an innovation night since, but we are looking to make a come back!

We also had some internal changes with TU20 founder Ella leaving the team to go build an autonomous car at Waterloo after being selected as a finalist in the General Motors AutoDrive Challenge. She now heads the Watonomous team at Waterloo, you can check it out here.

APRIL — On April 18th Silicon Halton hosted it’s 90th meet up as a demo night; inviting community members to showcase some of the cool stuff they or their companies have built. Among them was Matthew and Daniel, winners of the 2017 TU20 cup who demoed StarSpeak.

During demo night we also announced Learn2GetHired, our third iteration of the event. Learn2GetHired is a two part event, with the first part focusing on teaching students the skills they need to get a job, such as resume prep, personal media and personal pitches. The second part, which is hosted a week later, places students in front of local entrepreneurs and employers who are looking to hire students for the summer. Students then use their newly acquired skills to do a speed pitching session (3 minutes with each employers) and try to find a summer job.

MAY — May finally rolled around and on May 10th and 17th we had our Learn2GetHired event. We had tweaked the event from previous years, but it went very well with over 40 students and employers attending the pitching part of the event. A number of students received summer jobs, some of which you can read about here.

JUNE— was a busy month for TU20’s. After school ended, many of us headed off to work summer jobs. Four of us ended up at Geotab working in various technical roles and it was great to see a large (for Halton) tech company hiring young, local talent.

We also opened up applications for new TU20 members. We were looking to grow the team to build on our 2016-2017 school year achievements. Our team had slowly been growing through the years from 4 to 7 to 12 in order to handle the more ambitious projects we were taking on.

After applications and interviews, we selected our new 2017-2018 team and had our first meeting. We got to know each other, talked about our goals for the year and reviewed some of the past work TU20 has done. Afterwards, we headed over to Silicon Halton Meetup 92 to meet the Silicon Halton community.

While at TechToronto in March, I received a message on facebook which caught my eye. Our facebook page had caught the eye of MP Pam Damoff’s community engagement manager Chris, and we eventually scheduled a meeting in June. Pam, Chris and I met to discuss a number of issues including how to grow the local tech community, getting more girls involved in the technology sector and some of the governments’ programs. We had a great discussion and are looking to make the most of the next steps.

And lastly (it really was a busy June), TU20 Lead Denys presented at the Disrupt HR Toronto conference. His talk was about Preparing The Next Generation of Employees focusing on some of his experiences from TU20 and beyond. The talk had very positive reception and can be found below.

Preparing The Next Generation Of Workers | Denys Linkov | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo.

JULY—was pretty quiet and we spent most of it examining some important leadership exercise based on the Amazon leadership principles. We began incorporating these into our preparations for the upcoming school year. We were also working on redesigning our website.

AUGUST—As August rolled around we began organizing our school chapters. School was just a couple weeks away and we needed to hit the ground running. We created some How To Guides and brainstormed how to avoid some of the common issues we faced when setting up previous school chapters. Our goal for the 2017-2018 year was 10 chapters with 10 regular attending members.

We also released our new website, moving over from static HTML pages to WordPress. It was a nice visual upgrade to what was now a two-year-old website. We also began working on Passport, which you’ll read about more in the October section.

August also marked the release of our first TU20 series, the summer internship series. It’s a seven part series on Oakville News highlighting some of the summer internships that TU20’s have worked at.

SEPTEMBER—School’s back! We began the process of organizing our school chapters including finding teachers, rooms and getting principles’ signatures! We eventually got the chapters underway and they are now humming along.

We welcomed three new chapters, White Oaks, Blakelock and Abbey Park, headed by Pratham & Vikram, Dimitry, and Taylor & Dave, respectively.

OCTOBER—To kickoff our TU20 season, we created a new event called the C3 workshop focused on getting students working together and showcasing our plans for the upcoming year. We discussed the school chapters, the TU20 cup and Learn2GetHired. We also had two guest speakers join us, Emma and Julia Mogus, who Cofounded Books with No Bounds. They shared their journey of starting and running the charitable organization and it’s amazing what they have achieved so far. You can read more about Books with No Bounds here.

We also revealed our new open source project, Passport. Initially a chapters based attendance, Passport is looking to grow to become an all in one destination TU20’s. You can check it out here.

NOVEMBER—As we wrapped up the C3 workshop we opened up registration for the TU20 cup. The theme for the year was on smart cities. It’s quite a broad topic and we’re excited to see the projects that come out of the 2018 TU20 Cup.

On Nov 4th we were also invited to attend the SWATposium, an all day robotics event hosted by the St Mildreds FRC team. It was exciting to see everyone so passionate about robotics. We were invited to give a presentation and to share a bit on TU20. Our presentation was on Learning to build great products, focusing on the iterative process of building new products.

We also launched our first University Guidance series in November. The University Guidance series focuses on helping highschool students better understand University programs and to offer some tips. We had two sessions, one for Computer Science & Engineering at U of T on Nov 16th and the second for Computer Science and Software Engineering at Waterloo on Nov 23rd . We had a good group for each of sessions and covered a variety of topics including admissions, living arrangements, internship programs and student life. We’re continuing our series this year, you can learn more here.

DECEMBER—And it’s December! 2017 had been an exciting year, and we had a busy December.

The TU20 cup continued to be our focus as we to on-boarded teams, mentors, community and corporate partners. As part of the cup, we also teamed up with the Oakville public library to host workshops. We hosted our first on Dec 16th on Understanding smart cities and are hosting our next one on Jan 13th on Thinking like a start up.

We also met with Burlington Economic Development to discuss some of the areas of interest for them from the Smart City side. It was great to see the municipalities getting on board with the event, especially given the timing of the Canadian Smart City Challenge

Great news also came our way with Microsoft, Geotab and Curious Orbit Cloud Consulting sponsoring the 2018 TU20 Cup. We’re excited to be back in the Microsoft Canada HQ for the event and looking forward to digging into some of the Geotab data for insights.

And here is our current team!

We got some very excited news from two of our TU20s. They are going to be spending the 2018 Summer working at Microsoft in Redmond! Brandon and Mohammed will be working as Software engineers on the Cloud and Ai teams respectively. It will be exciting to hear about their experiences!

As we begin 2018, we remember all our ups and downs from 2017. We’re looking to build on our successes and failures and looking to continue to help students to achieve success in the tech industry.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us this year, especially Silicon Halton Co-Founders Chris, Rick and Reema, we couldn’t have done it without you!

We’re always looking for new members, executives and partners, so if you are interested, send us a message and we’ll be in touch! Join us in making 2018 the best year to date!