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When I started my degree, my program had no student association. The Software Engineering Students' Association existed on paper but had been dormant since the pandemic, and a few earlier attempts to revive it hadn't stuck. When I stepped in there was no team and nothing to build on, just a couple of friends and me.

So we started from zero. We pulled together people who believed in the idea, convinced the Faculty of Engineering to give us an office, and began reaching out to companies willing to partner with us. The goal was simple: give software engineering students real value through connection, technical growth, and community.

Within a semester we'd grown to 27 members across marketing, design, development, academics, partnerships, and events. Over 300 students came to our events that first term. We were sponsored by Warp and the National Bank of Canada, ran a study session with Notion, and hosted workshops at cuHacking.

Leading it meant being a bit of a Swiss Army knife: onboarding sponsors, designing the logo and sponsorship package, helping build the website, keeping things running. But the part that mattered most wasn't any of that. It was learning to rally people around a shared vision and trusting the team to own their pieces. The best thing I built wasn't the org, it was the group of people who could carry it forward.

That's the real test of this kind of work: building something that outlasts you. I got to do it in my first year, but it was never a solo effort, and that's exactly the point.

I had four apps each tracking one part of my health. Whoop tracked recovery, sleep, and heart health, Hevy had all the sets I'd logged, my Withings smart scale tracked my body composition, my smart water bottle had water intake. Four data trackers, but none of them were talking.

Whoop told me that my heart rate variability was unusually high one morning and, like always, offered no reason why. But I knew the reason: I hadn't had enough water the day before. The data to explain the number existed, it was just sitting in a different app that Whoop didn't have access to.

So I aggregated all that data into one dashboard. Now the answer was made available for the Whoop.

To make it better, I added AI insights. Instead of four dashboards I have to keep track of, it reads across all of them and tells me what's actually going on: that my bad HRV followed a dry day, that a stall on the scale in my lean body mass lined up with a stretch of overloaded training weeks . A short plain language read every morning, based on data no single app could see alone.

That's the power of data. The answer was never missing, it was just in the wrong place.