Welcome to TreeHacks! This year, our first in person since the pandemic, we’re going all out: dozens of sponsors, awesome workshops, incredible speakers, mentors, and judges, and over $130k in prizes. But our most important asset is you: the hackers.
This year we’ve admitted 1696 hackers to our event, 830 of whom are Stanford students who are auto-accepted. That means we took 866 students from colleges around the world to attend our event. We’ll cover their travel costs, food, and accommodation in the hope of fostering an inclusive space for bright students from all quarters to benefit from each other’s expertise. But in a year where more than 4000 applied, how do we choose who comes and who doesn’t?
At TreeHacks, we prioritize a few things in our hackers. First of all, our overarching goal is to build a diverse and interesting group. The benefits of this ought to be obvious: the more we can vary the type of people who come to our event, the more likely it is hackers will come away from the weekend with a genuinely impactful experience. Putting people in a room with other talented college-aged students who think differently from them is the most important part of this event.
Our non-Stanford hackers hail from 40 U.S. states and a handful of other countries. We have a 50/50 gender split and ultimately decided on admitting 40% advanced, 35% intermediate, and 25% beginner hackers. These expertise categories were determined by the TreeHacks team as we analyzed applicants. All of the admitted students impressed us deeply in some way with their application.
The TreeHacks team read every single one of the 4000+ applications submitted ourselves. Actually, we read them three times.
Every hacker’s application was read by three different team members and scored based on a few categories which include, among others, technical experience, passion demonstrated, and level of fit. What actually makes someone stand out in these categories? There’s no better person to ask than Blaine Wells, a Stanford sophomore and the TreeHacks team member who read more applications than any other (555!).
“What was important to me is the passion that I see in your application, if I can tell that you care deeply about what you do. If you feel like you can actually create some sort of change in the world, regardless of your capabilities or what you have around you, that’s what makes a good TreeHacks hacker,” said Wells.
Cathy Zhou, also a Stanford sophomore and a dedicated application reader, shared a similar approach. “I was mainly looking at the projects that [the applicants] had done in the past. And also like clicking through their GitHub links to see what ideas that they have executed in the past and then what they said they were looking forward to doing.”
All who read the applications shared a sense of awe at the dizzyingly varied and inspiring passions acted on by our applicants. It was this sense of awe that inspired one of TreeHacks’ unique scoring options — each of the categories was scored 1–4 based on short answers, resume, and provided links (LinkedIn, GitHub, etc.) but team members also had a big red button option: a 999 “OUTTA DIS WORLD VERY RARE!” score.
After applications received each of their three evaluations, the tech team dug deeply into the data to weigh each of our different categories.
“Trying to visualize all our data and applicant pool took a lot of sleepless nights,” says Sathvik Nallamalli, the tech team lead. “Trying all the combinations where we can optimize the number of people we take within our budget while also getting the best group we can find was certainly difficult.”
Ultimately, we settled on a group we’re incredibly enthusiastic about. We landed on 464 from in state and 404 from out of state. Our hackers include budding scientists with projects on the International Space Station, AI researchers published as coauthors on major LLM papers, founders of companies and nonprofits that do everything from sexual violence prevention to psychology-based studying help, and hardcore coders with tens of thousands of commits. But we also selected people just getting started on the technical side — those whose passion showed so clearly that we knew they’d land on their feet and hit the ground running.
We’re thrilled with our hackers and can’t wait to see what they produce.
TreeHacks is Stanford’s annual hackathon. This year it occurs Feb. 17–19 in person.
Article credit: Theo Baker
