Working as Departments Chief for ACM XRDS Magazine over the past few years has put me in contact with talented individuals and interest groups ranging from California’s exuberant Silicon Valley to Indonesia’s remote tapestry of mountainous islands. During this process of dialogue and discovery, I was often humbled by my ever-growing awareness of the cultural and geographical diversity of the world’s Computer Science community, and how little I actually knew about Tech in other parts of the world.

“How is campus life in the Computer Science departments in Santiago, Chile?”

“Is Systems Programming taught better in Eastern Europe than in the US Midwest?”

“How much emphasis on Mathematics is there at HCI departments in Japan?”

“How do students organize departmental LAN parties to play Counter Strike in South Africa?”

“Which university has the best community for drone programming in India?”

There are all questions that my younger self could have never dreamed to crack. My horizon and preconceptions were constrained not only by my limited access to information and travel destinations, but also by my social sphere and the rigid official advertising facade put up by institutions in foreign lands and cultures.

In 2016 however, that need no longer be the case. At XRDS, we have embarked on a project to share with you first-person stories of life on the most active and energetic ACM Chapters on Computer Science campuses around the world.

Here is our pilot episode, which is  pioneered by students from the ACM Student chapter at the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies in Northern India, who form one of the most involved and smoothly-organized student chapters in the South-Asian country. Together, we worked over a period of a few months to explore and define the message of their video, and finally to showcase their hard work to the world.

We hope you’ll enjoy meeting them, and do not hesitate to visit their social media channels if you’d like to know more.