hackathon hopping

CS. The dreaded degree that almost every person fears, be it for the awful stench in the lecture halls, the lack of grass touched or the unfortunate job market. For many people, this is their only perspective on the computer science degree and to be fair, it isn't fully their fault. Many people go into CS thinking that it'll set them up for a 6-figure job straight out of college by getting straight A's. This ultimately results in them realizing that getting high marks isn't as easy as they thought, causing many students to resort to cheating and in the end, left without a job and their dignity. Is this every CS major's demise?

Now, don't get me wrong. There is money in computer science and in fact, there's more now than there ever has been. But of course, with a high reward, there's also a higher risk. Many seem to forget that it's no longer 2010 and everyone out there is fighting to get a spot at FAANG companies and learning basic Python from Youtube is no longer enough, let alone a computer science degree by itself. You must be waiting for the beat drop if you've made it this far. So what are we supposed to do?

Well, I'll tell you how I started only a year ago. During the summer of grade 12, I met some friends online during a very hectic university admissions season. We were all in the same boat and had no idea how to "stand out". That's why we started our "hackathon hopping" series. Hackathon hopping consisted of finding any random hackathon that interested us on Devpost and following through with it until the very end (of course, as a team). Once we were finished with that hackathon, we would enrol ourselves in another one the next day, while documenting every step of this journey on Instagram and Youtube. P.S. Check it out here on my friends' Instagram accounts: pranavpatnaik_, sambhav_athreya, akshinmakkarx2.

The first project we made was for a hackathon called, GIA Hacks. To say the least, it certainly wasn't our best creation and not because of the idea. We created EcoConnect, a project made to connect environmentalists with each other and organize community trash cleanups. Our entire backend wasn't even made through code. We made it using a third-party app which took prompts to create any application of your desire. Funny enough, we won "Best Vision" after pitching our project like pure professionals (another aspect of hackathons you may discover soon). This moment was what propelled us towards only dreaming bigger, and trust me, our projects got a lot better too, using actual code.

Aside from the excuse to make projects from scratch with the motivation to win real cash prizes at hackathons, hackathon hopping allowed me to realize that there's much more to life then just being the average Joe. If I hadn't stepped out of my comfort zone to get to know these people, I wouldn't have made lifelong friendships that inspire me to do more everyday. So, if you're gonna take one thing out of this post, even if it isn't about computer science or hackathon hopping, it should be about the importance of taking that leap of faith to try something new and being ready to fail, but also learning along that beautiful journey. I can guarantee that you will NOT regret that computer science degree as long as you're okay with standing out, as I am attempting currently, while writing this.