SIH hackathon 2022 Experience

Today I wanted to share with you my experience at Smart India Hackathon 2022. So I participated in the SIH 2022 which was held at various locations across India. Smart India Hackathon 2022 is a nationwide initiative to provide students a platform to solve some of the pressing problems the industry is facing in daily lives, and thus inculcate a culture of product innovation and a mindset of problem-solving.

It helped me a lot for shaping and growing as an individual, it helped me learn how to work in a team and the do’s and don’ts of a hackathon. I think everyone should try at least once in their college time to participate in a hackathon.

Firstly there were different problem statements and every team had to choose one out of those. There were a total of three rounds for this hackathon, The first was the inter-college round, and various teams from our college participated in this round.

There were limitations on the college that they could select only 15 teams throughout the college. Every team selected a different problem statement. There are two broad domains: hardware and software. So from our college 15 teams were selected. Then in the second round, we had to upload the prototypes of our project and they would finalize which teams would come for the final hackathon.

There were limitations on the number of people in the team as well maximum there could be six members. Then the results were announced online we got to know that our team got selected for the final round and we got super excited and overjoyed. Then we informed our college that a total of three teams from our college got selected. Our problem domains hackathon was going to be held at NIT Silchar, Assam. At that time Assam was suffering through the floods therefore our families were worried if we would be safe or not. And it was a task to reach silchar as well, coz everyone in our group couldn’t afford a plane and we were staying at Pune, it would take 57 hours to reach by train.

So somehow we managed to reach Silchar, after reaching there we were welcomed by the students of NIT, we stayed there at their hostels they were quite clean, had our food at their canteen. The 57 hour journey was tiring but exciting as well.

Then Finally the hackathon began it was a 48 hour hackathon. We were assigned our work stations and we were provided food time to time, coffee was also available. We had to code 48 hours straight, of course we were allowed to take breaks whenever we want. They provided a Relax room as well where we can take naps and return to our work stations for coding again.

Our problem statement was Food waste management, we had developed a website which we collect the leftover food from ceremony halls, mess or hotels, etc. And then distribute it to either orphanages, if it is eatable or else to the biogas plants.

There were six teams in our problem domain out of which one team was going to win. The top five teams teams who manage to win will get a cash prize of 1 lakh Rs.

There were a panel of three judges who were monitoring what changes and improvements we should make in order to make us win. They were giving us points on the basis of improvements that we made and were we able to satisfy there queries, etc.

So after all this, the results were announced the next day in the auditorium There were different problem domains across the whole college all of us were sitting together at the auditorium then finally the results were announced and we were declared the first runner up and another team from Kolkata managed to win the gold medal. So in this way the journey ended we were super happy that we could make our college proud, we were taking lots of memories and a silver medal with us.

Pro tip: Do’s and Don’ts of a hackathon : Select a problem statement which has less number of entries it will broader your chances of winning.

Thanks for reading 🙂