Introduction
Hey there if you are just starting college, Engineering precisely, then brace yourselves because you are going to be hearing this word a lot especially if you are in IT-related branches. Hackathons – super fun, massive in learning, and overall just a great and invaluable experience. I am a first-year CSE student and even though first years are limited in what they can offer in such events, I embraced the challenge and participated in a fair amount of competitions and hackathons throughout my first year, so allow me to guide you through what they are and give a little glimpse of few of them.
Smart India Hackathon
Now this was one of my first ever hackathons that I participated in, not having any prior idea, and just like that pushed myself into the lion’s cage but exploring is learning. The first step is always to form a team and register, being just freshers it was difficult to get people on board and get them as excited as you are but hey that’s what takes to be a team leader taking everyone all along, one of the skills you also learn. Then there is a list of problem statements that different ministries, state governments, etc. put up on the official website and you have to select the domain, the statement, the category, etc. It’s all there in the pamphlet, keep following the instructions as you go. There are three rounds: the college level, the semi-final, and the finals. you have to submit an abstract, and a summary, give a presentation to the judges who come, and then get nominated for further rounds. My team and I proposed to create an AI-ML-powered app for women’s safety, we had a prototype but it was of course on paper, other seniors had the code worked out as well, but that was not surprising, we all took it as a learning experience. After receiving slightly critical but insightful feedback, I was not sure if we would get nominated but to our surprise we did! Thereafter you are required to submit the idea on the portal itself after which our SIH 2023 journey ended since we didn’t make it further, but it was such a great experience, along with it I found a group of amazing people who are now my go-to for any hackathons that come.
Google Girl Hackathon
This came a little later, in April, in fact, it’s still ongoing as we say, I didn’t make the cut but an experience goes a long way, instead of making the same mistake yourself, learn it from me and avoid that bump all together. So the first round is the screening round or the basic application acceptance wherein you send out your resume. Now disclaimer for all my dear freshers that you are not expected to have a very well-rounded or heavy resume because well, it’s natural you do not have any experience and we cannot make stuff up so again just keep trying and exploring, and that’s exactly what I did, my resume did get selected, might be the college extracurriculars or side projects or just good luck but moving on to the sessions which were taken by googlers themselves, they talked about various roles in the industries, their journeys to google which was overall very insightful and interesting, thereafter in the same week we received credentials to go the next round that is the famous coding round. There were 2 questions on bit manipulation and array I would say starter DSA but I am still learning DSA and currently not that proficient in it so I failed to progress to the next round. Overall it was a win in my book.
Tech Tesseract
Now this was my college’s code club and ACM( Association of Computing Machinery) chapter flaghship hackathon. We had created an mental wellness and organizational app ‘Careforyou’ for caretakers who take care of elderly and people with complex health disabilites. We created this using flutterflow and had to submit a 3-4 minute video based on our idea. Now this was a little finer and in much detail than the rest of our projects and to our surprise we won the first position in first year category.
Conclusion
As you can see I didn’t limit myself just because I was a first year, I took it on myself to explore as much as I could and of course when you love what you are doing working hard does not become a problem. So explore and particpate no matter how much you know, go out there and just start, don’t think just do. Hope this article helped you and gave you a different perspective on the hacnkathon life, cheers and all the best!