During student orientation, I found a list of all of the Oregon State student organizations and clubs and I wrote down which ones I thought were interesting: Society of Women Engineers, Association of Computing Machinery, Security Club, the Hackathon Club, and a few more. After looking at some of the websites for the student orgs, I noticed that they referenced a return to in-person meetings. Since I’m an e-campus student, that wasn’t going to be an option for me. The Hackathon Club however, specifically referenced how they were originally founded by and for e-campus students. This was immediately attractive to me and I put the club on my short-list.
Once I started my first quarter (March 2021), I joined all of the organizations on my short-list and silently observed to see what I could do to participate and get involved with. I saw a notice on the slack for the Hackathon Club that they were looking for new club officers. I wanted to hit the ground running, and submitted the interest form.
Prior to enrolling at Oregon State, I had experience in judging hackathons at a past employer, Peek, and in participating in a hackathon through taking a full-stack development class in Kuala Lumpur. I absolutely loved both experiences — it’s just incredible to see what people can build in a limited timeframe. Above all else though, I thought that participating in a club would help expand my network internally at Oregon State and provide me with some experience that could benefit me personally and professionally.
Luckily, I was selected to join as the Vice President of the club. Together with the other officers, we quickly got to work in planning one hackathon a quarter, and overall, I took the lead in organizing three hackathons. Through that experience, I got a lot of inspiration from the participants, and once I felt I had more development experience, decided to participate in hackathons as well.
Last summer, I joined InternHacks, a 7-week virtual hackathon. Hundreds of college students from around the country were randomly assigned into groups, and we had to ideate, plan, build, and present a group hackathon project within two months. My group decided on a platform for machine learning researchers and students who want to decrease bias in their field. We offered a Python scraper tool that analyzed the metadata in a researcher’s dataset as well as provided best practices for researchers on how to avoid or limit bias with their datasets. In recognition of our work, we won “Best Architectural Design” and “Best Technical Problem”.
Earlier this year, I also participated in Beaverhacks, the quarter hackathon hosted by the Oregon State Hackathon Club. I temporarily stepped down from my role as an officer in order to participate. Although I was initially excited to take part, it unexpectedly took place during my flights to India (SFO – EWR – DEL). As a result, I had to code the majority of my project on a 15-hour flight from Newark EWR to Delhi DEL with zero wi-fi (too expensive). Once I arrived into my hotel (Holiday Inn Express near the New Delhi Airport), I logged into the wi-fi, created my presentation slides, pushed my code into Github, and submitted my project on-time with seconds to spare at 3 AM local time. I had made a platform that gamified completing household tasks, a project that was inspired by moving into a new apartment with my husband the month prior. I received great feedback on the project and won First Place – Overall.
Next weekend, I will be participating in JPMorgan Chase’s Code For Good Hackathon in Columbus, Ohio. This will be the first hackathon where I will be traveling (travel is paid for by JPMorgan Chase) so I am very much looking forward to this opportunity. Not only will I be gaining serious hackathon experience and networking with students and industry professional, I will also be helping solve real-world problems that impact social good organizations.
I highly recommend looking into hackathons — planning and participating — as a way to further develop your software engineering career. Not only has hackathons helped me raise my core technical abilities, improve necessary non-technical skills such as project management and public speaking, but it has also opened numerous career opportunities. Beyond whether my team or I win or not, I have always leveraged my learnings and challenges in hackathons during interviews.
In my next post, I’ll discuss my internship interview process last year and what tips I have from that experience.
