Bringing Hacker Culture to Purdue
The Story of Purdue Hackers Thus Far
There is a running joke among Purdue Engineering students about how this is a place where aspirations and creativity come to die. Eventually, with minds overflowing with equations and theorems, tired graduates discover that the real world is very different from the one they were taught.
On a snowy winter weekend Luke Walsh, Jack Hammons and I attended the inaugural MHacks at University of Michigan. Afterwards, we realized we had learned more in one weekend than we had in all the Computer Engineering classes we took that past month. It was as if blinders had been peeled from our eyes.
More importantly, we met a ton of amazing, exciting, and inspiring people. We all still remember the group that sat to our left during the event. A few hours in we learned that they had been featured on Good Morning America for their app simplewa.sh. In our mind, they might as well have been celebrities. It was enthralling and I remember coming out of MHacks saying, “Why aren’t people at Purdue this cool?”
As we drove home, we reflected on how much we had learned. We compared and contrasted the culture we had seen during our time at the hackathon with the staunchly conservative academic environment we perceived at Purdue. Right then and there we decided we needed to bring hacker culture to Purdue.
The plan was simple, we wanted to do for Purdue what Michigan Hackers had done at U of M. We aimed to pull together like-minded students to learn from each other, and work together on projects they found interesting. We thought the experience we had during that weekend could become the norm for tech students at Purdue.
We expected 4-5 students. Instead we got 50.
Purdue Hackers took off like wildfire when we launched this semester. We expected 4-5 students to show up so we could all do some weekend hacking in an apartment. Instead 50 people showed up to our first event. We quickly learned that there were tons of students who felt exactly the same way we did about the culture at Purdue, and that we didn’t have to do this alone.
After the first event momentum has continued to build. Somehow we convinced the College of Science to buy us T-Shirts, and we took a group of ~100 students to MHacks this fall. Our old-gold and black stuck out like a sore thumb in The Big House, and none of us could be happier.
The reception outside of Purdue has been equally as positive. We had engineers from Hulu sit down and very frankly discuss which concepts we learn in school are really necessary, and also the skills new graduates are generally deficient in. Microsoft hosted a mini-hackathon with us. We have had calls from venture capital firms trying to tap the talent pool of motivated Purdue students, and have seen freshman go from not being able to write an if-statement to pitching their idea for the next big website.
Looking ahead, there’s so much more that Purdue Hackers will be doing. We partnered with an organization putting on BoilerMake, a 36 hour hackathon next semester. We are promoting and partnering with two new co-working spaces which have recently popped up near campus, and we’re on our way to influencing core engineering and computer science curriculum in the university.
Working with the bureaucracy of a major University has been tiring, but we truly believe in the power of students taking control of their own education. The future of education is coming, and we don’t intend to wait.
If there are any students out there who are tired and frustrated by the environment they have experienced, you are not alone. You are surrounded by students just like you, waiting for change. You may not think you are the best person to start a movement, but if you don’t, who will?
Hack on, Boiler up, and as always…Hail Purdue!
