From 22^nd to 24^th June 2018, Jasmin Chan and I were honoured to be given the opportunity to participate in Hong Kong University's International Symposium on STEM Education. The event commenced with a formal high table dinner at St John's College, which was quite eye-opening for us. Through the high table dinner, joint programming sessions, panel discussions, and group projects, we engaged with fellow tech enthusiasts and experts from all around the world.

Sharing a passion for technology, my fellow group mates and I connected instantly. In just 3 days, we cultivated friendships that has lasted to this day. Moreover, I also had the privilege of meeting a student mentor from HKU, who proved to be immensely knowledgeable in Virtual Reality and Machine Learning. With his help, I was able to integrate the openCV library to my image detection convolutional neural network -- something that I had been struggling with for weeks.

The symposium pushed me to my limits with its quality lectures and high expectations. With the guidance of our mentors, my group outperformed and successfully programmed a HTC Vive VR project with Unity -- a language that was new to the whole group. Although we did not end up winning first place with our project, the experience was stimulating for us, and inspired us to proactively take action to solve issues in our own communities.

To conclude, The International Symposium on STEM Education connected me with like-minded peers, and proved to be an exhilarating experience that I will forever hold dear.

Reported by: Choi Ching Lam