36 hours. 300 competitors. Your vision.

Everyone’s heard of Hackathons. But how many have heard of a Makeathon? For starters, not even me.

Makeathon is a 36 hour product design competition that brings together students from engineering, art and design, science, and business backgrounds to prototype innovative products that fall under the chosen categories. The winners of each category are given prize money to pursue their design further and possibly make it a marketable product. This was the second year this event was held at Michigan and with a strong first year, goals and aspirations were set higher than ever this time around.

Let’s take a couple steps back. How did I get involved? The previous summer was filled with talks with my cousin of entrepreneurship, ‘going off the road’, and the interest to do something that was pioneering. I was hungry for a source of inspiration, something to transform this small bubble of interest into a raging passion. Halfway through my third semester at Michigan, I sought out MPowered Entrepreneurship with two main goals in mind — to meet people with a spark and be exposed to exciting ideas. After talking with the president and the project leaders, I quickly joined the Makeathon team to work on marketing.

I went to the first meeting still unsure about my decision and honestly a little apprehensive to step out of my comfort zone, only to be received warmly and quickly integrated with the rest of the team. Early on, we set grand goals of having close to 300 participants in this event, which in turn meant effective sponsorship and marketing schemes. For the next three months, our team diligently worked on finding sponsors or advertising this unique event. Throughout this busy period, we added more members to our team, and they too quickly joined the family (the more the merrier, right?). All 10 of us became very close friends in no time and formed one of the most interesting, diverse, and enjoyable groups I’ve had the pleasure of being in.

Marketing was something I had little to no experience in, and was eager to take this as a novel learning opportunity. We had an ambitious plan for three months covering the bases that all student organizations cover — flyering, bannering, emailing, chalking, and hosting tables in public locations. These seemed to work for the vast majority of organizations, and if these cards were played right, they should work for us too. But, as a group trying to promote radical, out of the box thinking, we were itching to do so much more. A couple meetings and video conferences later, we had a host of events that we would try to implement that was unique to and reflective of Makeathon’s mission. Often, these brainstorming sessions were host to some of the most fun I’ve had in the planning process. Thoughts were unrestricted and we could go wild. All we had was a piece of paper or a whiteboard (if we got lucky securing the Innovatrium) and a few minds that unshackled themselves from the confines of practicality. After these lively sessions, we would return to reality to critically analyze each and every idea and judge its viability. A few of the ideas that emerged from these were the snowman building contest, exploding flyer boxes, and a huge 4x4x4 foot diag box with our logo. In the end, only the diag box in the picture above was successfully completed but the process of thought was the important takeaway.

Creating the box was an arduous process — starting from Home Depot trips to gather the materials, painting and drilling the wood, and finally assembling on the diag on a cold night. Too bad it only survived on campus for a weekend; it was removed as soon as campus security or student activities caught whiff of it. We knew the lifetime of the box was going to be short, especially since we didn’t seek out approval (to which we would most likely be denied). But the mantra “better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission” kept us motivated to keep building. As the event drew closer and closer, we saw a substantial increase in sign ups, thanks to the banners, tables, targeted emails, and of course the box played its part as well.

The last couple weeks passed by in a blur, and before we knew it we were already ordering shirts and printing brochures for D-Day. The entire team was beyond excited for this weekend, the final testament to see if months of preparation had paid off. With close to 300 participants signed up, passionate sponsors, bountiful snacks, delicious meals, and of course, abundant amounts of Red Bull, we were all ready to dive headfirst into this sea bursting with new ideas.

The night before, we had our final planning meeting, and no one knew how long it would last, just that it would be long. A few hours in, team members started bowing out one by one, finally leaving the two project directors to figure out the last logistical items. There was a fairly strict schedule to follow that weekend with each of the team members playing specific roles at specific times. On Friday, February 6th, all of us arrived that afternoon at the Art and Design building and started set-up of sponsor tables, check-in locations, etc. Slowly that evening, participants checked in, helped themselves to refreshments, formed teams and a few began prototyping their ideas for the weekend. We were expecting to go back home that night fairly early after quickly arranging workspaces and come back early on Saturday. How wrong we were. Table and room assignments, alongside organizing food and material supplies was an exceptionally tedious process; we ended up returning to our beds around 4am.

I slept like a rock that night, snoozing through my all 10 of my alarms (no surprises there). An hour and half later than when I was supposed to be there, I awoke with a start seeing 7 missed calls and message after message of “Rohan, where are you?” or “Rohan, wake up!”. Taking Uber for the first time, I got to there as soon as possible to see that building had already commenced. Oh man, I was so eager for this day! When I wasn’t helping in the materials and food room or answering the myriad questions that people had, I stole every spare moment to walk around the workspaces to talk to all the teams about their ingenious ideas. Some were more realistic than others, but it was inspiring to see the passion each and every team had. People were building products ranging from foldable furniture and headphone stands to effective compost bins and hand motion controlled wheelchairs. Apart from building, the day was filled with presentations by guest professors and sponsors as well as an attempt at a dance party later in the night to keep the hype strong. As the day progressed, some teams slowly realized that their original idea was too ambitious for the weekend or that we didn’t have the specific required materials and headed out. After one last round of talking to the remaining teams around 3 am, I sneaked to the 3D printer lab wanting to become the very best and print my own Pokéball. To my utter dismay, teams had intelligently left projects printing that night to be picked up that morning. A little disappointed, I returned to the Art and Design building and surrendered myself to sleep after a long day.

When I awoke on Sunday morning, or rather, when I was forced awake, one of our team members had apparently had the same itch to create something and was walking around with a Thor hammer he made last night in the metal shop. There were just a couple hours left for building, teams were adding finishing touches and soon the expo began! With a couple professors, representatives from the Center for Entrepreneurship, and some sponsors as our esteemed judges, each team pitched their projects and got an opportunity to see all the other completed ones as well. The Art and Design building was buzzing with excitement, with teams rejoicing how successful their imaginative products turned out, or people congratulating each other on their ideas, or with Makeathon talent members sighing with satisfaction.

At this moment, I felt as if the countless hours of work per week we all put in over the last few months, and especially during this weekend was well worth the effort. Seeing all these teams creating something out of nothing over such a short period with just their vision and passion guiding them was incredibly inspirational. Although I was initially disappointed I didn’t have a chance to participate in this event, in retrospect, I’m very pleased with the role I played on the organizing committee. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had the rare opportunity to talk to almost every participant and be able to follow not one or two or three, but almost 50 teams throughout their design process from conception to completion.

I knew made a fool of myself time and time again thanks to my red fedora, I knew I sent way too many emails to the participants, and I knew that I still had to go home and prepare for three midterms the next week. But at the end of it all, this spectacular weekend would be one etched in my memory for a long time to come.

Originally published at rohandasika.wordpress.com on February 26, 2015.