Better Than Winning: 5 Things I Learned At A Stanford Hackathon On Valentine’s Day

From my experience, most of the nerdy allure of a hackathon includes getting free swag, meeting insanely amazing companies, getting more free swag, making new friends, sleeping in said free swag — though not for longer than 2-hour naps — and winning cool prizes.
Luckily, I’ve experienced all of this and more.
Over Valentine’s Day weekend in February of 2016, I had the pleasure of spending an amazingly romantic day with my new true love: the first of many such free swag, the Hoodie Pillow.

Now, that’s not entirely true. My other true love(s) included playing the ukulele, primarily responding to messages with creepily random-yet-surprisingly-relevant-to-the-conversation gifs, and pretending to surf as I longboarded around USC in the pouring rain (whose annual frequency surpassed the number of times I got A’s in college…).
But in the context of hackathons, my Hoodie Pillow (and some computer science background) did in fact play a huge role in making Valentine’s Day 2016 one of the best of my life (so far).
TreeHacks, VR, and Bernie Sanders 360 Video
Among 600+ other amazingly talented and bright minds from across the nation, I had the pleasure of attending Stanford’s 2nd Annual TreeHacks hackathon from Feb. 12- 14, 2016 with my team of three other brilliant female computer science peers, and it was such a blast.
The 8-hour charter-bus trek from LA to Palo Alto was brutal, but our creatively-pumped selves came ready to kick off an epic weekend of hacking.

Throughout the 48 hours of Soylent-driven sleep-deprived debugging-mania, the four of us managed to (attempt to) create a Google Cardboard and Android-based app called The Queen’s Speech.
“Fitbit for Speech” and Hackathon Results
A professional development VR app, our hackathon-baby was born to help America overcome its number one fear: public speaking (though it’s debatably now a recently shelved secondary fear in comparison to America’s more prominent worries over corruption of government officials and Trumpcare).

By placing users in front of a virtual 360 video audience (like this one), The Queens’ Speech aimed to provide users with a realistic speech-practicing platform.

It supplemented this live practice with unique & reliable speech analytics — speech playback, speaker-to-audience engagement, and the number of times you said ‘um’ or ‘like’— to enhance the user’s public speaking skills and to improve their speech confidence.
After demoing our self-proclaimed “Fitbit for Speech” in front of countless judges and industry representatives — I voted for labeling our work the less-catchy “Withings Activité Pop for Speech” for the smart watch’s simplicity, innovation, and ease of use — we were happily shocked but extremely thrilled to be awarded two generous prizes at the end of the day:
- TreeHacks’ 1st Place Prize (Most Polished Hack) — for which we received a free dinner ($2000) to any Michelin-rated restaurant for the team. We went to Melisse in Santa Monica, CA. We had a hard time spending $2000 so we ended up each buying the chef’s cookbook too.

- 1517’s Best Hack A Team Should Keep Working On Post-Hackathon — for which 1517 graciously granted our team $1,000 to continue developing the VR public speaking assistant.
My team and I came back to USC from the weekend’s coding vacation exhausted but with a revitalized interest in solving real-world problems through simple hacks, and we fortunately also returned with cool prizes.
When I look back at it all, it’s crazy to think how quickly it all happened.
We made a prototype in 48 hours.
We won the hackathon.
Now I’m pursuing a career in VR (at Felix & Paul Studios in Montreal!), and looking back, I’m so grateful to have been able to start exploring the world of VR through a simple hackathon project at TreeHacks.
I now share with you a list of five memories, lessons, and overall advice I learned at TreeHacks that I thought were better takeaways than simply the feat of “winning”. These also reflect the attitude and understanding with which I hope more students will approach hackathons in the future.
1. Hackathons are like a 2-day summer camp (Fun!)
Probably the coolest thing that I remember from hackathons is this: Sleep is overrated when you are having fun. It’s all about having fun and enjoying the experience.

You check in with your “camp counselors” (the hackathon organizers), drop off your sleeping bag and abundance of chargers at your “campsite” (random tables or couches in Stanford’s engineering center), indulge in fun and make new friends. You also engage with many industry members and learn more cool API’s and SDK’s, possibly even winning raffles along the way.
If nothing else, hackathons remind you that you are never the most casually-dressed person in the room and that it’s okay that you are essentially a walking billboard of free-swag-advertising for Facebook, Microsoft, Twilio, you name it…Again, free t-shirts make for great pajamas.
2. Viewing the other young innovators as competition will only worsen your experience.
When I’m at a hackathon, I initially avoid engaging with other teams for fear of them stealing our “trade secrets” (aka our hacky work-arounds for common coding challenges). I’ve come to realize that my fear and deep distrust in competing peers is unhealthy and completely unproductive.
When you think about it…
- The stakes aren’t that high — Though you might land a job interview, winning a hackathon ultimately won’t win you a trip to Mars.
- Hackathons are a place to learn—They do not measure your skill or competence in engineering, they help you grow as a thinker, a creator…
- You’ll have more fun! — You’ll stress less, become a better team player (even helping other teams), and maybe even make lifelong friends.

The focus of a hackathon is to hack, not be the best. It’s about rapid team-forming and idea-brainstorming. Hackathons can actually mimic mini product cycles — project planning, task delegation, design, testing, implementation, product demo and review — even though those steps don’t seem as formal when you hack (or are sleep-deprived).
3. You don’t have to be an expert in anything to win.
This one seems the least intuitive. How can you win a hackathon without having some expertise in something? In fact, it’s all about the attitude!
You are not expected to be an expert. Why else would there be mentors present to help you every step of the way? It’s great to have a good technical basis so that you aren’t depending on everyone else for your project to come together, but even then prototypes don’t have to be code!
Also, hackathons are a great opportunity to explore subjects and technologies you don’t know well but are interested in learning more about. Plus you will most likely meet and work with people who will complement your interests, and who seek your specific experience.

Random story: Our team unexpectedly met a Stanford Professor (Tom Kosnik, Management Science and Engineering) who ended up giving us a tour and an entrepreneurial pep talk, plus graffiti stickers as a moral for breaking the rules, and heart-shaped rocks to remind us that there will always be someone in the world that cares about you. All to say, we left this hackathon with more than just public speaking and VR knowledge!

4. If you’re looking to win prizes, ask for help.
At TreeHacks, I basically stayed up and slept on a couch right next to the Microsoft table and Microsoft technical evangelists. No chair? No problem, especially when you’ve got neck-pillow hoodies and carpet to soften the blow that it’s 6am and you are still experiencing HTTP request problems. Though we had to modify our initial hack idea to fit the time constraint, we ended up learning a lot along the way, and came up with a solid prototype that ended up being humorous (thanks Bernie Sanders) while also effective.

A crazy coincidence story: I was browsing the web for code examples on how to query Microsoft’s Project Oxford API (now Cognitive Services), and was able to find a Git repository which implemented similar functionality as my own hackathon product. I quickly realized the repository had last been edited 5 minutes prior and that the GitHub username of the repository owner corresponded to a fellow TreeHacks hacker only two tables away! I walked over to the other hacker and we tried to solve our problems together. The world may be small, but no problem is too small to seek help with from others, even if they are technically your competitor.
5. Hackathons don’t have to end once you get home.
There are so many more hackathon opportunities after your hackathon ends. After TreeHacks, I surprisingly won Best Big Data Hack at LA Hacks (Bruins…) for a speech wearable I made with a team of strangers I met hours into the hackathon. We were a USC-UCLA team comprised of a freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior, and we managed to get past our school rivalry and make a cool hack. If you like your team, you can even keep working with them afterward.
I later took a class on entrepreneurship, and realized just how much I appreciated my hackathon experience. It helped me understand how to prototype. Coming up with cool hackathon project ideas isn’t so different from brainstorming startup ideas!
Plus, hackathons are a mindset, not just an event. Being open to admitting you don’t know everything contributes to healthy and productive communication in the workplace.
Go be creatively badass wherever, whenever
All these being said, there’s no doubt that working under pressure with constraints is a great challenge for any creator.
What’s most ironic about this? I started writing this very article to finish the final steps of a hack I worked on at Microsoft’s annual company-wide //oneweek hackathon, alongside 15,000 fellow Microsoft hackers across the world.

So go out into the world, be open to the daunting task of joining a hackathon, or simply hack in your own time! It’ll definitely open your eyes to the joys and challenges of rapid prototyping, and encourage you to embrace the unexpected knowledge you’ll gain along the way.
You might even discover your future career, learn how to survive on Soylent 3 hours of sleep, or even win a free Hoodie Pillow :)

What hackathon takeaways do you have?
