Korea University Summer Hackathon (1)

~ The Pre-Event

created: 2022.08.26. 17:14 · modified: 2022.08.28. 13:37 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

Work in progress.

From the 19th to the 21st, I participated in <Korea University Summer Hackathon: A Voyage Together>, hosted by Korea University’s [ software development and research society DevKor · Design and Formative Arts Emergency Committee · Business School Student Council ]. I learned about it from a promotional post in the KAIST School of Computing class of 2018 group chat. I’d wanted to try a hackathon at least once, and the dates didn’t conflict with my lab internship, so it was a great opportunity.

The application asked for some basic personal information and a portfolio in any format. I hadn’t written a CV or portfolio recently, so I took the opportunity to make a new page on my website. My education and work experience had been sitting, not quite organized, near the bottom of the homepage; moving them to a separate page made everything look much cleaner. If you’re interested, take a look ~ . I remember struggling to find anything substantial to put in personal statements in my first and second years of college, so it feels good to have something to write about now.

Each team had five members—one planner, one designer, and three developers—and with twenty teams, the hackathon had around 100 participants in total. I considered gathering a few friends interested in development and forming a team together, but that didn’t fit the spirit of the event. I also thought working with entirely new people would be worthwhile, so I applied on my own.

Each team had one leader, regardless of their role, and the application asked in advance whether you wanted to lead. I didn’t have a strong preference either way, so I selected “Not sure.” After my participation was confirmed, though, the organizers contacted me personally to ask if I could be a leader. I guess fewer than twenty people had volunteered. Since they asked, I couldn’t bring myself to say no, so I agreed.

On the evening of the 13th, a week before the event, there was an online pre-event to form teams that would plan and develop services together at the main event. Team leaders gave idea pitches introducing themselves and the kinds of services they wanted to make, and the other participants listened and applied to join a leader’s team.

Idea pitches. Pitching an idea without knowing the theme was a bit funny, but it was unavoidable for a hackathon where advance work wasn’t allowed and the theme would be revealed on the day. So instead of proposing a specific idea, I introduced things I’d developed and described the motivation they shared: an eye for problems across different fields and the drive to act on them.

To be honest, I didn’t prepare very hard for my pitch. The allotted time was quite short—two minutes and thirty seconds—and I’d only agreed to be a leader the day before the pre-event, so there wasn’t much time to prepare. Above all, as a fifth-year undergraduate who’d been around the block, I can’t deny that I rather arrogantly assumed my fellow undergraduates couldn’t have done all that much (the event was open only to undergraduates).

But wow, the moment I heard the first leader’s presentation, alarm bells went off. They were far better prepared than I’d expected! And it wasn’t just the first person. The second did well, and so did the next. Some had remarkable accomplishments; others, even without those, had a clear philosophy and conveyed it remarkably well. As I listened, I was suddenly afraid that, far from having the upper hand as a leader in this team-building process, I might be the one desperately hoping to be picked. My turn was fourth or fifth from last, and while I waited, I hastily worked a philosophy of my own into my pitch. I finished with a presentation I wasn’t ashamed of, though I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it either. A reminder not to let my guard down or get conceited: I need to step out into the world now and then and remember how small I am.