Standard Chartered Diversity Hackathon Experience
Hackathon Experience
Hey Guys, this is Maitryee, and here’s my experience with Standard Chartered Bank Diversity Hackathon.
One day, while scrolling through my LinkedIn feed, I came across an opportunity called the Standard Chartered Diversity Hackathon. It was exclusively available to final year B.E./B. Tech female students set to graduate in 2023. As usual, I suddenly visited their page to register. The whole hackathon process took around 1 month.
Upon completing the registration process, all participants were sent the link to the Pymetrics Games Assessment. This assessment consisted of 16 games, thoughtfully crafted to highlight each individual’s potential and provide a better understanding of their character, beyond what could gather from the application and resume. The games were both easy to play and enjoyable.
As an organization, Standard Chartered Bank places a strong emphasis on its core values. Consequently, a few days after completing the Pymetrics Games Assessment, we were asked to participate in the Valued Behaviours Assessment. This online assessment presented us with hypothetical work scenarios and asked us to evaluate various available responses. Essentially, this round was designed to assess our behavior and actions in different work situations, similar to an HR evaluation.
One week after completing the Valued Behaviours Assessment, I was notified via email that my application had been shortlisted for further evaluation. The next round of assessment involved coding, specifically three Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) questions. The difficulty level of these questions was set to medium-level Leetcode problems, and they pertained to topics such as arrays, strings, heaps, and hashmaps. Participants were given a total of 90 minutes to complete the assessment.
Fortunately, I managed to clear the coding round and was among the 72 girls selected for the final hackathon from a pool of 8000 registrants. A week later, we were invited to attend an event where senior leaders from the organization provided an overview of the company and shared guidelines for the upcoming hackathon, scheduled for the following weekend.
The eagerly anticipated hackathon took place on March 11th and 12th, 2023, and lasted for 48 hours. In preparation for the event, we were assigned to teams of five members each, with approximately 14 teams formed in total. Furthermore, there were five problem statements, and each of these statements was assigned to three teams. Additionally, each team was assigned a mentor to guide and support them throughout the competition.
To ensure effective communication among team members, we created a WhatsApp group as our first step. We then had a meeting with our assigned mentor to gain a deeper understanding of the problem statement and clarify any doubts we had. Once the coding period began, we regularly held clinic meetings to discuss each other’s progress and ideate further on the given problem statement.
During the hackathon phase, three members of my team decided to quit for personal reasons. This left me and one other teammate in a state of confusion about whether to continue or not, especially since we had only completed the research phase and had yet to include the necessary features on the website. We had a discussion with our mentor, who provided us with the motivation, guidance, and support that we needed to continue. We were truly grateful for this encouragement and decided to persevere with the hackathon, resuming our work with renewed energy.
The hackathon consisted of two phases: the semi-final and the final. After the semi-final round, around five teams out of the initial 14 were selected to proceed. During this phase, we presented a demo of our website along with a PPT. I was pleasantly surprised and could not believe that our team made it to the top five finalists.
Among the top five teams, three teams were selected as winners, and I am proud to say that our team was awarded the First Runner-Up position in the Standard Chartered Diversity Hackathon. The journey was both challenging and fruitful, and my teammate and I were thrilled to have gone from wondering “how will we do it?” to celebrating the fact that “we did it”.
Based on the performance and feedback from the mentor, I was offered a full-time job with Standard Chartered GBS for a Software Development role. 🥳
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