The Cal Hacks Fellowship: Transcending Beyond “the Hack” 🚀💻🌎
The Cal Hacks Fellowship is a program started by Cal Hacks (UC Berkeley’s Hackathon Organizers) to assist student developers in advancing their hackathon projects.
Origin💡
Every year, there are hundreds of “hackathons” that take place around the world. Thousands of people gather at these events to come up with innovative ideas, and then they implement those ideas really quickly over the span of one to two days. The projects, or “hacks”, that come out of these events are incredible — things ranging from sight for blinded individuals to mind-controlled cars; however, the unfortunate truth is that most of these projects are not pursued after the hackathon concludes. 🙃
That is why we decided to start the Cal Hacks Fellowship, a program that provides an infrastructure for hackers that want to pursue their projects after the conclusion of the hackathon. 🚀💯
At UC Berkeley, we host the world’s largest collegiate hackathon, Cal Hacks! Cal Hacks 4.0 brought 2,200 students to UC Berkeley to our football stadium, Cal Memorial Stadium 🏈. They worked for 36 hours, consumed 9,000 pounds of food, drank tons of energy drinks (literally), participated in workshops, and created amazing projects. By the end of the hackathon, judges with backgrounds in venture capital and entrepreneurship went through and selected six teams to be part of our first ever fellowship cohort — our inaugural class! ⭐️
Purpose 💼
Hackathons have been on the rise for nearly a decade now. Every year, new hackathons pop up at different universities around the world to cater to the global development community. These events run on a variety of themes and thousands of developers swarm in to participate and gain the experience of creating cool things in a time-condensed, electric environment. A common criterion to gauge the success of a hackathon, generally, is as follows: “This hackathon was successful because we had _____ number of students come and they created ______ projects all over a span of _____ hours!” 📈💻
The general theme we identified was that the metric for success is size; how many people came, how many projects were created, and the duration of the event. This metric serves its purpose when it comes to comparing X hackathon to Y hackathon but we believed that this metric constrains the impact hackathons can have on the global community because it focused just on the size of the event itself — not it’s long term impact. 🌎
Many people attend hackathons to learn, grow their skill sets, or just make something cool for the experience — which is great! Not all hacks need to move forward and become a 2000-starred 🌟 Github-repo or the next “unicorn” startup 🦄. At the same time, most hackathons have not created an environment that fosters hacking after the hackathon for the individuals that desire to continue pushing their projects forward after the event itself.
A hackathon not giving its attendees an environment that fosters innovation after the event is like a parent not giving their child food after birth.👶 🍼
We believe that hackathons can offer more value to its hackers by providing guidance and support so that, if a hacker wishes to do so, they can pursue their “hacks” to the next level (whatever that level may be). We started the Cal Hacks Fellowship at UC Berkeley to address this need. 🐻💯
Our Inaugural Class 🚀
This year (2018), we had the opportunity to select from a batch of very innovative UC Berkeley student developers. These students created projects at Cal Hacks that used technologies that are currently at the forefront of industry, wowed the venture capitalists and founders that judged them, and implemented ideas that could revolutionize the world as we know it.
In terms of support, we gave each of our six teams the following:
- office space at Berkeley’s SkyDeck and The House
- a dedicated student ambassador per team
- weekly sessions with lessons in project development and entrepreneurship
- guest speakers from C-level executives, engineers, founders, and students
- $1,000 grants to each of the six teams (equity-free)
- Access to Cal Hacks’ professional network of companies and mentors
The Fellows and their projects (along with descriptions) are listed below:
Tesselate: (Suneel B., Trey F., Nathon L.) 🖨
3D Printing offers quick and easy access to a physical design from a digitized mesh file. Transferring a physical model back into a digitized mesh is much less accessible in a desktop platform. Tesselate seeks to create their own desktop 3D scanner that can generate high fidelity, colored and textured meshes for 3D printing or including models in computer graphics.
Icebox: (Jasmine S., Ho Yin C., Julia Y., Jinnie J.) 🍨
Icebox is a smart grocery assistant that helps you save money by managing your food inventory. The iOS app uses machine learning to fully automate keeping track of, predicting, and budgeting the groceries in your fridge. In doing so, Icebox not only helps you spend less, but also contributes to our vision of reducing food waste globally.
FixIt: (Janaki V., Rishi V., Gefen K.) 🛠
FixIt is a crowdsourcing app for community members to identify and up-vote issues in public spaces that need Fixing! Inspired by a desire to be socially responsible citizens, FixIt allows individuals to feel a sense of ownership toward the public spaces that are a part of their daily lives. Users of FixIt can exercise this ownership by raising Issues and up-voting Issues important to them, trusting FixIt to share the Issues with the individuals responsible for Fixing them. The next time you see a broken street lamp, leaky public restroom toilet, hazardous sidewalk, or something wrong with a public space, instead of just hoping someone fixes it, you can help FixIt!
SpotMe: 💪
SpotMe is a mobile app and smartwatch combo. Think of it like a Fitbit, but for weight training at the gym. We uniquely use sensors to actively track and analyze your real-time movement for a variety of exercises. Thus, we can automatically identify and log your workouts (# of reps/sets, intensity, and form analysis, among others). Using this data, we then provide customized plans for workouts, nutrition, and rest. Additionally, our accountability program, which uses a system of penalizations and rewards, ensures that your follow through on your goals.
Ailean: (Julie L, Katherine N., Jacqueline A.) 🤖
Ailean is a web platform for immigrant parents seeking to improve their English language skills through situational conversational modules to improve their job marketability and day to day situations. The United States of America currently houses a large population of immigrants who struggle with learning the English language. These individuals do not get the opportunity of upward social mobility, and are often discriminated against in the workforce. As a result of improving their English language proficiency, parents will provide greater educational and economical support for their children.
Palette: (Drew K., Chanan W., Graham H., Ryan H., Kyle K.) 💬
We’re changing the way people present by building a tool that replaces a traditional slide deck. Users can spontaneously find any asset (videos, documents, graphs, etc.), sourced from their own files or anywhere on the Internet, and place them onto the shareable canvas in place of a traditional slide deck.
The Fellows:
Our fellows all come from varying experience levels, backgrounds, and majors but one commonality they all have is a passion for computer science and technology — here they are! 👪
Community Support 💪
We were fortunate to have a strong support community to kickstart this initiative for our hackers. Our sponsors include Berkeley’s SkyDeck, 1517, HVF, and The House — without them we would not have had the space or resources to support our fellows.
How to get involved? 💯
More so than just creating a program for Berkeley students, we are aiming to set a precedent for what hackathons around the world should strive to do for their hackers. There are a bountiful of ideas that are created at these events that are left abandoned post-hackathon so we want hackathons to tap into all this innovative potential to its fullest! 💡
If you would like to learn more about the projects that are being worked on by our inaugural class of fellows or about the Cal Hacks Fellowship itself, leave a note on this post or contact me directly at my email aakash@calhacks.io! We are hosting a Demo Day in a month and would love for any interested investors, engineers, founders, entrepreneurs, and students to attend, meet the fellows, and hear about we’ve worked on over the last semester. 💪
Demo Day: Thursday May 3rd, 2018; 6–8pm; Berkeley’s SkyDeck 🌙
Interest Form: https://tinyurl.com/CHFellowsDemoDay 🙌
If you are interested in starting a program similar to the one we put together, drop a comment or email the team at team@calhacks.io — we would love to help you help your hackers create the future! 🚀
Hackathons have just tapped the tip of the iceberg. 🎉💻
Feel free to give this post a 👏 if you found this article valuable or interesting — we’re planning on pushing more content to the Cal Hacks Medium so if you’d like to stay up to date, consider following us! 🐻
