Clubs and Community

I aim to be in a community where I can thrive. I prefer surrounding myself with people that I can learn from, and learn with. This page discusses my time with all the communities and clubs I have been apart of, big or small, as well as some efforts I have made to create communities.

The larger topics in this category have been split into their own pages. The following is organized from oldest to newest.

High School Robotics Club

In the spring of 2018 I created a robotics club at my high school with a friend. After running through the necessary hoops with faculty, we became official and got a room in the building for club activities.

There wasn't much at first, but we were eventually donated a 3D printer thanks to our advisor. This 3D printer, which was a handfull to get working, was a TEVO Tornado FDM printer. This 3D printer taught me many things 3D printing related, like bed adhesion, filament flow rates and quality, different materials and their properties, and the frustration of failed prints. The printer was by far not user friendly, but we made it work. My friend even spent the time to get OctoPrint to work with it, allowing us to queue up prints and watch them print as we were in class.

Some time after, the school purchased an Ender 3 V2 which was much nicer to work with. Around this time I introduced my self to CAD through the site TinkerCAD. This allowed me to make very generic and functional prints such as enclosures for electronics projects or structural components on antennas.

By late 2019 the club had gained 3 more members, and we registered for the FIRST Tech Challenge robotics competition. Participating in this challenge was a great teambuilding experience and introduced me to what an engineering team could be like. I go into more detail regarding the construction and engineering of the robot for this competition on my projects page.

University Study Group

When the school term for my first year of university began in autumn of 2020, the pandemic was in full force and everything was online. This was a hurdle for most, and I thought it would be nice to connect with my cohort during this time.

My solution was to create a study group through the social platform Discord. Similar to teamspeak, Discord is used within the gaming community as a way to send text messages, share media, and join conference-style voice calls. With the added benefit of easy user interface configuration, I made a server on Discord for the 2020 University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO) cohort and called it the "Just Vibin Study Groups".

On the first day, all new engineering students attended a first day orientation zoom call. During this call I promoted the study group. After some time, the study group Discord server began gaining members, and eventually exceeded 250 members by the middle of the first term.

I would host group study sessions for many of the first year courses. During these sessions I would use Discords screen sharing functionality alongside my drawing tablet to solve practice problems with other students. Some of these sessions would reach 70 members. I always found I learned material better by teaching what I know and learning what I don't from everyone else. Because of this I had a very successful first year, even with the stress of having to take 6 online courses in the span of 12 weeks.

Overall, the server was very popular with above 500 members after the first term (December 2020), and peaked at 754 members in early 2023. After the last term of the 2023 year however, the server started to have less traffic as everything at the university had returned to in-person. By the end of 2024, majority of the students had moved on or graduated, so the server is officially a thing of the past.

UBCO IEEE MLRC Student Branch

In my second year of university (spring of 2022), a friend introduced me to the executive chair of the universities UBCO IEEE McNaughton Learning Resource Centre (MLRC) student branch as it had just revived itself after a two year hiatus. Right away I knew this was where I would spend most of my time while on campus.

Not even a month after learning about the space I became a volunteer lab monitor. I spent most of my spare time on campus in this space, to the point that I considered it home on campus. As someone who enjoys discussion with others on topics I take interest in, when somebody needs help with anything electronics related, I would be more than happy to offer a helping hand. Because of this, I found myself connecting with the community and becoming something of a volunteer tutor.

PCB Design Workshops

Through the IEEE Student branch, I was given the privilege of hosting multiple workshops to teach students how to design printed circuit boards (PCB). Hosting the first workshop in 2022, then 2023, and soon 2025, I taught students how to go from an idea and schematic, to designing a functional and presentable circuit board -- knowledge that can give students a boost in finding jobs as PCB design is not taught in the regular curriculum.

The event had a high attendance, with the 2022 and 2023 workshops having over 50 students in attendance. I taught students how to take a schematic, draw it on KiCad, source parts from digikey, then create a PCB layout. From the PCB layout, I demonstrated how to export the files needed to send to manufacturers to have the boards created.

More can be read about the 2023 EWorkshop and 2025 EWorkshop on my projects page.

Other Volunteering History

Outside of academics and engineering, some other recorded events I volunteered for can be found below.

Calgary Ukrainian Festival 2024

I was in Calgary Alberta for a Co-op over the summer of 2024. In June the Calgary Ukranian Festival (CUF) took place. Being that my uncle was one of the founders of the CUF, he asked if I wanted to volunteer, so I agreed to. I helped with unloading and loading drinks for the bars, as well as set up and take down of all the stands, tables, and chairs.

Overall it was very fun to be apart of the CUF in 2024, especially since it had been well over a decade since the last time I had attended the annual event.