HackMIT ‘14
Lottery Results
The results are out! We are excited to announce that we received over 5000 registrants from over 300 schools around the world for this year’s HackMIT. About 1400 hackers were chosen through our admissions lottery, and 3600 hackers were placed on the waitlist.
We adopted an unconventional admissions process. By going against the usual first-come, first-serve and application-based admissions, we took a risk. We felt that traditional methods didn’t reflect our idea of what a hackathon should represent, so we went with a lottery instead.
Why a Lottery?
When we began planning HackMIT ‘14, we took a serious look at our values. What was our goal in running a hackathon? After hours of deliberation (and a whole lot of froyo), we crafted a mission statement that every team member could agree with:
“As the TechX HackMIT team, our mission is to push the forefront of innovation by providing opportunities for students to work in a high-energy, collaborative environment.”
There are a lot of students who have never been to a hackathon, and a lot of students who don’t even know they exist. There’s a lot of untapped potential for innovation within these students, so we wanted to admit a diverse group of hackers. By implementing a lottery, we gave each hacker a fair chance of admission to HackMIT, regardless of experience and skills. We kept registration open for several weeks, during which we individually reached out to computer science clubs across the country and personally invited their members to register for HackMIT. We created over twenty “X University Takes on HackMIT” Facebook groups that hundreds of people joined, and we encouraged everyone, regardless of skill, to register.
Lottery Exceptions
The lottery was designed to give inexperienced hackers a shot at coming to HackMIT. However, we still wanted to reward those who really wanted to attend. Here are some exceptions to the lottery that allowed for auto-admission to HackMIT:
CatMIT
First, we devised a fun puzzle to reward intellectual curiosity, hacking skill, and extra effort for a select number of spots at HackMIT. Props to our Logistics Director, Michael Holachek, for creating our puzzle! Solving the puzzle guaranteed a hacker and his or her team entry into HackMIT, bypassing the lottery system. There were only 50 secret codes available, and amazingly nearly all 50 were taken within the first 12 hours of the release of the puzzle! We estimate that around 100 people in total ended up reaching the end. Want to find out how to solve it? You can read our solution guide written by my co-director Katie Siegel.
Hackathon Community
Second, we want to fulfill our mission statement of providing a “high-energy, collaborative” environment by improving our hackathon each year and reaching out to more hackers from around the world. We could not do this without the support of the hackathon community, which includes folks from PennApps, MHacks, YHack, and other great hackathons. By learning from each other, we can understand how to make hackathons even better learning environments, especially for those who have never been to a hackathon before. Therefore, we decided to admit about 25 hackathon organizers from other schools, and we hope they’ll use this experience to improve their hackathons as well.
MIT
Lastly, as MIT’s hackathon, we felt an obligation to give back to the MIT community. MIT students generally aren’t familiar with hackathons, and most students — even those majoring in computer science — have never attended one before. Last year, we only secured 200 spots for MIT students; this year, we wanted to give an opportunity to all MIT students that applied. We had an overwhelming response from the MIT undergraduate community, and we are excited to have them at HackMIT ‘14.
Lottery Statistics
For our first wave of lottery results, we selected 1408 registrants to receive admission. We admitted 98 hackers through the puzzle, 25 hackathon organizers, as well as all 745 MIT students. This left 540 spots for non-MIT student out of the 4157 remaining hackers, resulting in a 13% chance of admission. The “lottery algorithm” for these remaining hackers was completely random, with no bias based on any element of registration.
30% were female, 69% were male, and 1% did not specify a gender. 745 MIT students registered for HackMIT, making about 17% of MIT’s undergraduate population.
You can see some other interesting registration statistics below such as the number of registrations from other schools:
We also had fun reading through all of our registrants’ responses for the question we asked: “What would you like to learn at HackMIT?” We hope to take some of your ideas to innovate the novice workshops that we have been planning out for HackMIT this year! Here’s a word cloud showing keywords many of our registrants mentioned:
Again, if you did not make the first wave of lottery results, don’t worry! If a selected registrant does not complete the confirmation form on our website within 10 days, his or her spot will be given to another hacker on our list of registrants.
With such a great range of hackers registered for HackMIT, we are really excited to see what cool hacks will be created in October. We can’t wait!
Contact team@hackmit.org (or catmit@hackmit.org if you prefer☺) if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.
