Hold out your hand, and join our UNIHACK Fam ❤ (1/4)

I don’t know how a selfie would work with the entire team. This is just a quarter of us.

In any job, you’ve usually got two approaches to choose from — go hard or go home.

In the UNIHACK Fam, we like to go hard and push for the greatest results we can possibly get. There are a lot of lessons to learn in a high-functioning team. Many people don’t realise that there can be more to a student-run organisation than just semi-hard labour and partying hard.

In that sense, UNIHACK stands out, not only do our audience appreciate our events — tech people are always yearning to learn — but we also push our own boundaries as far as we can go. We’re not restricted by a governing body and we get to pick the direction we want to go.
This is not to say that our only goals are simply to work, work, work — we do our best to maximise the learnings of our team members and of course, to have as much cheeky fun as we can on the way.

We want to share that experience with you.

I imagine it can be a bit difficult to understand what the experience is like without a) knowing what we do on a day-to-day basis and b) seeing what we achieve at the end.

So I’ll answer a few questions first.

1. Who are you?

We are a mixture of students and recent graduates who are trying create something great together — showing the world the creativity of tech students when they collaborate, innovate and share ideas.

2. I’m too busy competing/by standing. Why would I want to join you?

Ghina puts this pretty well, “It’s not that much of a different experience being a competitor, compared to an organiser. Really, a competitor’s experience is limited to 2 days, where ours just lasts for 7 months.”

“You make deeper connections, stronger experiences and the product you ship at the end is pretty big.”

Deanna: “Regardless of whether you have experience or not, I’d say — just go for it. You will meet amazing people and learn so many new things… The Team Leads were all amazing in guiding us to the end goal… I’ve learned so many life lessons from Sarah [Sydney Sponsorship Lead] on top of professional skills *audible laughter*.”

3. You’re just another student event. There’s nothing to learn here.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to flaunt some of our achievements from the past 12 months:

1. Expansion 👏 to 👏 Sydney 👏 : The actual planning was a 4-month project between September 2017 — December 2017, this is when SUITS (University of Sydney Information Technology Society) from USyd got on board. We may or may not keep expanding cities 😉
2. Rising numbers: In response to demand and supply, both number of sponsors and competitors have been going up every year.
3. Incorporation: We have outgrown our place being just an event run by a student club at Monash University, to the point where we have established our own non-for-profit.
4. Other projects: We successfully partnered with the Monash Data Science Society to run their very first Datathon, and UNIHACK Mini (for first-year students) has been a success as well.
5. Developing our internal talent: I think we can safely say that it is well known in the industry that we take our hackathons seriously, and by extension, we have some pretty good people in our team for hiring too 😉.
   Our team members have worked/are working at companies such as Atlassian, Google, Facebook, Accenture, Deloitte, CBA, KPMG, Xero, just to name a few.

Piqued your interest yet? Tickled your fancy?
Follow the links on the bottom to read about what each team actually does. Otherwise, if you’re already convinced — apply to join the team today!

Hold out your hand, and join our UNIHACK Fam: Sponsorship ❤ (2/4)
Hold out your hand, and join our UNIHACK Fam: Logistics ❤ (3/4)
Hold out your hand, and join our UNIHACK Fam: Marketing and Tech ❤ (4/4)

Photos: Sophia Huynh