Why you should go to Hackathons with no prior experience

Aug. 10, 2024 | Categories: CS

Hackathons are pretty daunting for most beginners, either because they don't like to bathe in the sweat of 1000+ CS students or because they lack coding experience. Some of the most common responses I always get are along the lines of "I don't think I'm good enough" or "No one would want to team up with me." But I'm here to tell you otherwise.

For context, back in my freshman year of college, one of my favorite habits was hopping in between hackathons around my area. It started with BUHack, in which I won first place; Got destroyed at MIT reality hack; Winning another first place at Harvard Hack; and eventually, TreeHack (Funny story: Stanford actually rejected me from competing due to "competitive participant pool," but for some reasons, my ego back then was so high I actually purchased a $600 the night before just to sneak in and prove them wrong. I might have gotten myself a ban from future competing ^^) Oh, and the last 3 hackathons happened only 1 week apart from each other. 

My competitors were not just random people either! Here, I met upperclassmen, industry professionals, and even PhD students from other Ivy League schools, MIT and Stanford! Even at my school, I am only considered a somewhat above-average student. Clearly, I am outclassed, but perhaps that is my biggest strength.

At its essence, a hackathon is a tech startup competition. As a naive CS student who only recently learned how to code, I was able to come up with unique ideas before my brain got too used to the dull academic curriculum (I'm not dissing the topics I am learning at school but rather the typical projects like maze solver or tic-tac-toe). Even now, as a rising junior, my ability to come up with unique ideas has become slower due to increased technical awareness, which might make ideas more daunting than before (this is not an entirely bad thing, as I will discuss later.)  This is similar to how kids become less creative as they grow older to fit in better with norms. I'm convinced this is how Facebook was originally created, not through some college data structure class but through random college students who just like to fuck around with new ideas.

Now that I have hopefully given you some hope, here are the tips, pros, and cons of participating in hackathons:

• Tips: be prepared with potential ideas and technology beforehand. It is not against the rule to have an idea before the competition; most of my ideas come either the day before or on my way to the competing site. My suggestion is to look through what is trending right now (AI, XR, etc.) and pair them with currently outdated technology (answering phone calls, journaling, etc.). It is also important to be somewhat familiar with one or two frameworks. You don't even need to know the framework fully and in depth. The first time I actually built a VR game on Unity was at MIT Reality Hack and a month after that I won first place using Unity. The trick is to fail fast and learn fast.


• Pros: you get to have something to show off on your resume, but more importantly, you get to meet crazy smart people there! This is how I was able to meet one of my co-founders, have stories to score one of my internships, and increase my network with people in the industry despite having no lead as a first year.


• Cons: as much as I hate to say it, you are basically building trash made to be thrown away. I made this mistake, thinking my TreeHack project could simply be turned into a startup the next day. I have also met numerous people who made the same mistake only to have their applications crash a few hours after launch. The truth is, in the span of 2 days in which your only goal is to make something that works, a lot of corners are cut. In the end, you still need to have a proper software engineering background if you want to create something that is scalable and profitable. Use hackathon as a way to test out your startup idea, not to build the startup itself.

There you have it; if you are interested in my past hackathon projects, feel free to check them out on my website! However I would advise against trying to make sense of the code