So, for my off-campus meetup, I joined a number of other students from our class in going to TriPython’s June Project Night on June 14th. We all met with the regular TriPython members in a conference room at the Renaissance Computing Institute off campus. They brought pizza and drinks, told us a bit about the organization, we went around and introduced ourselves, and then we all sat down to work on our respective projects. I helped a couple of classmates brainstorm some problems with their code, and made some breakthroughs on my own project. Overall, it was a really great evening! Going into this, I was actually pretty apprehensive. I always get a little worried when going somewhere new alone, and that was compounded by the stereotype of programmers being predominantly white males, with a propensity for gatekeeping rather than welcoming, and judging based on your relative inexperience with coding. At least, that is the preconceived notion I was going in with, and I was happy to find it to be completely wrong. I saw a couple of classmates walking in around the same time I did, which dispelled the issue of entering a new space alone, and the TriPython members were very welcoming and happy to have us. While I did not actually interact much with anyone outside of our class while there, I could definitely see myself going back to this project night in the future. I definitely got the impression that I could easily ask the room for help on anything that I was stumped by, and am actually planning on going to their project night in July to see if they can help me transition from using Trinket to running Python on my laptop itself. It may end up being as easy as a couple of clicks, but if not, it will be great to have an experienced group of people there to help me get it up and running. Beyond that, I don’t know if I will completely mesh with them as a professional group; from their descriptions of their interests in Python during introductions, I feel like my goals are pretty different from their own (They were talking a lot about big data analysis and machine learning, while I want to explore Python as a tool to develop increasingly sophisticated games). But I definitely feel like I am welcome to join them anytime I need help, and who knows? Once I have a bit more knowledge and experience, perhaps I could help contribute to other’s projects as well.