Pack away your suit and your veil, HackSC’s funeral is cancelled.
Take out your scrubs and your mask, this is its rebirth.
HackSC is actually happening this year — it will be held on April 12–14 in downtown Los Angeles with applications going live this Sunday, February 10. The team organizing the event has had a busy and exciting past few months securing sponsorships and funding for the event, as well as booking the venue which will be announced soon. But along with the bureaucratic busywork which is infuriatingly inescapable when organizing extravagant events such as HackSC, the team as been able to make smaller developments in the meantime.
Visit hacksc.com to sign up for our newsletter and find out more information about the event. Also feel free to register on our Facebook event if you’d prefer notifications that way.
Hack Nights
Hack Nights are smaller, individually-themed gatherings that the HackSC holds on USC’s campus open to the Trojan student body on a weekly basis. Our first Hack Night will be this Wednesday, Feb. 13, and will focus around web development. Can you imagine a better way to prepare for the most romantic day of the year?
Besides setting an environment for studying, cooperation, team-building and learning, Hack Nights will often host speakers and workshops centered around the weekly theme. We found it to be a nice way to integrate the interdisciplinary culture and mentality around hackathons into more everyday campus life.
Bloom of the New Logo
Along with our efforts in re-establishing our place on campus, HackSC also rebranded. Our new logo is a hibiscus flower, which ultimately isn’t particularly relevant when it comes to anything tech-related.
So how did we settle on the hibiscus flower as our new logo? Well, the story is actually a bit more spontaneous than you might expect.
One of our organizers, for the sake of the story let’s call them Garvis, was walking down one of the central streets on USC’s campus. This streetway in particular is perennially lined with hibiscus flowers, whereas most other colorful flora on campus are planted when families are expected to visit. As Garvis was walking back from their first class of syllabus week (they refused to tell me what the class was was on the grounds that I’m “too nosey” and should “leave the café before trouble starts”), they saw a hummingbird at one of the flowers.
Apparently, the bird was having some difficulty accessing the nectar. It repeatedly bumped into the flower without getting it’s beak in the spout. Kind of like if Matt Damon’s character won in Interstellar. As Garvis walked closer to the flower to get a better look of the scene, he realized that the hummingbird wasn’t as concussed as it may have originally seemed.
The bird wasn’t blundering around the flower like a toddler slapping its inexplicably sticky hands on an iPad, but rather was driving its beak into one of the petals. Garvis is a good kid, they really are, but I’d be lying if I said their appearance is anything shy of terrifying. You know that scariest thing you’ve ever seen? That one thing that keeps you up at night after you stop remembering that embarrassing time you choked on your toy you brought for show-and-tell during your show-and-tell in third grade? Yeah. Garvis looks like that.
The hummingbird also recognized the horror of a human that is Garvis and flew off to save its little humminglife. What it left behind for Garvis to see was an engraving in the petal of the hibiscus flower of another hibiscus flower with the words ‘HackSC’ overlaid onto it. Garvis snapped a photo of it and sent it to the organizers’ group chat, and our designer quickly got to work and turned it into our logo we have today.
That wasn’t true. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
But you know what is true? HackSC is coming on April 12, the application will be posted on Sunday, Feb. 10, and we’re holding Hack Nights every week starting February 13.
We look forward to updating you with more news!
❤
