CS Student Association (CSSA)

Context#

NMSU's computer science department was not short of student organizations on paper. The problem was that they had gone quiet, and what activity did happen ran on faculty energy rather than student energy: the programming competitions were organized by faculty, even though they nominally sat under a student org. What the department lacked was not a club but a student-run one with a reason to exist beyond its own continuation, and something that pulled the whole major together rather than one corner of it.

CSSA was founded in August 2025 to be that, and I served as its founding president through May 2026, with Dr. Bill Hamilton as club advisor. It has run continuously since.

Building the organization#

The calendar was the easy half. CSSA needed a reason for students to show up more than once, so it was built around three recurring formats: programming contests for practice, industry panels for the career question students actually had, and social events for the part that keeps people coming back.

The harder half was who owned it. An organization that depends on faculty to run its events is one bad semester from going quiet again, which is what had already happened to its predecessors. So I recruited a full officer team of ten and split the org into internal departments, putting each area in the hands of a named student rather than whoever happened to have time that week. That is the change I would point to: not the events themselves, but moving the department's student organizing from faculty-run to student-run.

By the end of the year that meant about thirty students at regular meetings and roughly sixty at events, across five or six events. The gap between those two numbers is the honest shape of it: a large audience for the things worth showing up to, and a much smaller core doing the work.

It also needed money that did not depend on any one officer. I secured the club's operating budget: Google funds it at about $5,000 a year, with the FinTech Lab and the Hunt Center for Entrepreneurship at NMSU's Arrowhead Center also sponsoring.

hackNMSU#

The largest thing CSSA did was hackNMSU, the first hackathon in NMSU's history, held on April 10, 2026. It drew 55 participants across 18 teams.

I led sponsorship, judge recruitment, and event operations. Sponsorship was the binding constraint: a first-time event at a university with no hackathon track record has no prior turnout to point at, so every conversation started from nothing. Judge recruitment had the same shape, needing people willing to give their time to an event nobody had seen before.

The event was covered by the NMSU Newsroom and Organ Mountain News.

What this shows#

The predecessors had not failed for lack of a constitution. They had gone quiet because nothing about them was built to survive the students who started them. Most of the year went into the parts that outlast a term: a ten-person officer structure with real ownership, named sponsors instead of an ad hoc budget, and a hackathon with enough of a record that the next one does not start from nothing. The club still running is the part I would want judged.