VandyHacks IV Recap
Introduction
The VandyHacks team hosted VandyHacks IV, from October 20–22, 2017 at the Wond’ry at Vanderbilt University, and we’re ecstatic to share that the event was a success! This Medium post aims to share some of what we did well, potential areas for improvement, plenty of data about our event and its attendees, and more.
A Brief History of VandyHacks
VandyHacks was founded in 2015 with its inaugural event, VandyHacks I, taking place in the Nashville Entrepreneurial Center.
Later that year, VandyHacks shifted to hosting an annual fall event, with VandyHacks II taking place at Vanderbilt University’s Rand/Sarratt Student Center in fall 2015.
In fall 2016, we hosted VandyHacks III at Vanderbilt University’s new on-campus hub for innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship — the Wond’ry. The building had quite literally opened two days before the event, and ended up being the perfect venue (albeit a little cramped) for us.
And here we are — having just wrapped up 2017, we’re proud to have spent our year organizing VandyHacks IV. Keep reading to learn more about what we did differently this year and how it went!
Statistics
We wouldn’t do this post justice without sharing a few statistics from our event. Feel free to peruse the below charts detailing the following stats (and numbers from previous years, if applicable) along with brief analysis of each set of data:
- Applicants and attendees
- Unique schools in attendance
- Gender distribution
- Ethnicity distribution
- Graduation year distribution
- First-time hackers
- Major distribution
- Submissions
Applicants and Attendees
Over the past few years, we’ve seen consistent growth in both our application and attendee numbers. At this point, we think we’ve more or less hit a cap on how many people we can reasonably fit inside of the Wond’ry at Vanderbilt University — somewhere around 350–450 attendees seems to be the sweet spot for VandyHacks given our current constraints.
We’ve also seen our growth from VandyHacks III to VandyHacks IV slow down, which is in line with the capacity we can actually handle. For VandyHacks IV, we built an application and registration system based on HackMIT’s Quill — the requirement of registering an account with us in order to apply to VandyHacks IV may have deterred some from applying. Despite this, our total number of applications still grew by 3.19%.
This was also the first year that VandyHacks did not admit every applicant. Instead, we instituted a rolling admissions process in order to ease the number of attendees actually present at VandyHacks IV and ensure everyone still had a great experience without the issue of overcrowding.
Unique Schools in Attendance
This year, we saw a slight decrease in the number of unique schools present despite a higher number of attendees. This particular statistic could be attributed to any number of factors, but having over three dozen schools in attendance at our event remains a figure we’re proud of.
Worth noting is that Vanderbilt University students certainly showed out this year, with 249 (or 55.5%) of this year’s hackers attending Vanderbilt!
Hacker Demographics
As will be covered later, VandyHacks strives to cultivate a diverse, inclusive community that welcomes hackers from all backgrounds. Our annual events provide data to help us check ourselves and learn whether or not we’re making progress. See this article’s later discussion of the topic of diversity and inclusion for more detail on how we approach these challenges and ideas we have for the future.
Gender Distribution
This year, 21.83% of our attendees were female, which is an increase from this statistic being under 20% for our first three events. We’re certainly proud of our progress, but our work is far from done.
Please note that the below chart does not include attendees who indicated their gender as Other or did not specify a gender. In total, these attendees comprised 1.96% of all attendees at VandyHacks IV.
Ethnic Distribution
Our ethnicity distribution for the event is more or less where we expected it to be. That being said, there’s always room for improvement in the name of increasing diversity and ensuring everyone has an equal opportunity to be a part of the hacker community.
If you’d like to learn more about where the tech industry as a whole lies with regards to ethnic/racial diversity, feel free to browse the web for the many sources of discussion surrounding diversity in the tech industry. In the meantime, here is an interesting report published by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the topic.
Please note that the total values here add up to 494 hackers, which is greater than our actual number of hackers because some indicated more than one race on their application to VandyHacks IV.
Graduation Year Distribution
Across all of our attendees, we saw relatively similar numbers of attendees from every graduation year available on our application (2018 to 2021). The Class of 2020 in particular certainly had a presence (at this time, these hackers are likely in their second year of undergraduate study).
VandyHacks strives to host events that are welcoming to hackers regardless of their experience level. While the Class of 2021 (at this time, these hackers are likely in their first year of undergraduate study) had the fewest hackers present of any of these graduation years at VandyHacks IV, it wasn’t by much — the total range of these values is only 27 hackers, or 6.01% of our total attendance.
Please note that we did not have a method of distinguishing graduate students from undergraduate students in collecting this data. That being said, the number of graduate students at our event is likely negligible, and these numbers are more than likely very similar to the actual number of undergraduate students who indicated each graduation year on their application.
First-Time Hackers
As mentioned earlier, VandyHacks strives to host beginner-friendly events, and we’re ecstatic that 46.1% of hackers at VandyHacks IV were first-time hackers!
We aim to support new hackers and welcome them to the community by hosting workshops aimed at hackers who may have never even written a line of code before VandyHacks. This year, we hosted beginner workshops in Web Development, Android Development, and Unity Development, along with a talk on the basics of using Git.
Before the workshops began, we hosted a switch-session, allowing students to get a short (~10 minute) taste of every track before attending the full beginner session of any track. We hope that this helped students get an idea of which track they were most interested in pursuing and learn more throughout the session.
After the beginner sessions, we hosted intermediate and advanced sessions for each topic as well to guide hackers through each step of building a project with the respective technology. We hope that hackers who had perhaps zero development experience walking into VandyHacks IV were able to find their experience fulfilling and walk out with an amazing project under their belts.
Major Distribution
VandyHacks believes that hacking is for everyone, regardless of a hacker’s major/course of study. As such, we like to see how many of our hackers do or don’t come from traditional academic backgrounds (i.e., Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and similar majors).
While a majority of our attendees did indeed come from traditional backgrounds, we were able to draw a significant number of students from other engineering disciplines, students from other STEM fields, and even a few from non-STEM fields.
Please note that the below data is shown as reported and contains many similar/duplicate majors under different names. Additionally, there were more majors reported than hackers because some students indicated more than one major on their application to VandyHacks IV. Finally, majors represented by five or fewer hackers have been omitted from the graph, and a list of those majors can be found below.
Majors represented by five or fewer hackers at VandyHacks IV: Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, Administration, Aerospace and Aeronautical Engineering, Anthropology and Archaeology, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Biological Engineering, Biological Sciences, Business, Business Management, Cellular Biology, Chemistry, Child Development, Cinematography and Video Production, Civil Engineering, Cognitive Science, Computational and Applied Mathematics, Computer Systems Networking and Telecommunications, Computer and Information Sciences, Cyber/Computer Forensics and Counterterrorism, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Electrical Engineering Technician, Electrical and Communications Engineering, Elementary Education, Engineering, Engineering Science, Engineering Sciences and Mechanics, English, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Finance and Accounting, Geography, German Language and Literature, Human Development, Human Resources, Information Technology, Japanese Language and Literature, Management Information Systems, Mathematics & Statistics, Mathematics Teacher Education, Medicine, Molecular Biology, Music Performance, Network Database and System Administration, Other, Philosophy and Social Work, Political Science and Government, Pre-Medicine Studies, Psychology, Public Health, Public Policy, Public Policy Analysis, Religion, Science Teacher Education, Spanish Language and Literature, Statistics, Studio Arts, Web Page and Digital Design
Submissions
Naturally, we hope that every hacker is able to submit a project at the end of VandyHacks every year. This isn’t always the case, but we’re proud that VandyHacks IV yielded 72 amazing projects by Sunday morning when hacking ended — feel free to peruse the hacks on the VandyHacks IV Devpost submission page.
This was a slight decrease in project submissions from VandyHacks III, but is in line with our overall upward trend of project submissions over the years. Feel free to view a talk about hackathon submissions rates by Harrison Stall, President of VandyHacks III, here.
Other Points of Interest
VandyHacks IV presented our organizing team with a new series of challenges that we were excited to tackle with fresh solutions, along with various areas for growth that we wanted to explore. Here’s a description of a few of the things we tried for VandyHacks IV and discussion of how they panned out.
Having a Local Keynote Speaker
At VandyHacks III, we invited Jeff Rothschild, a Vanderbilt University alum and founding VP of Engineering at Facebook, to speak at our opening ceremony. Jeff was great to have with us and spent quite a bit of time on Friday night speaking with students and sharing his wisdom.
For VandyHacks IV, we decided to look a bit closer to home for our keynote speaker. We’re thrilled to have had Robyn Mace, Nashville’s Chief Data Officer, serve as our keynote speaker and a final round judge for VandyHacks IV.
Robyn was able to provide incredible insights to our hackers in her discussion of the value of civic data and the ability for technology (and its creators) to empower communities. Civic tech isn’t something VandyHacks has explored before, but after hearing Robyn’s speech, we’re certainly inspired and encourage anyone interested to learn more about it.
Travel Logistics
Travel is a huge obstacle to attending hackathons, so VandyHacks tries to ensure that anyone interested in attending VandyHacks IV faced no financial burden to do so. To do this, we offered bus routes to target schools, gas reimbursements to students with vehicles, and flight/bus reimbursements for students especially eager to get to our event without a nearby stop on one of our bus routes.
This year, we sent out four buses along the following routes:
- Chicago, IL → Urbana-Champaign, IL (UIUC) → Nashville, TN (VandyHacks)
- West Lafayette, IN (Purdue University) → Nashville, TN (VandyHacks)
- Atlanta, GA (Georgia Tech) → Nashville, TN (VandyHacks)
- Gainesville, FL (University of Florida) → Nashville, TN (VandyHacks)
This is the first year that we sent a bus with two pickups (our route starting in Chicago). Despite the potential logistical challenges here, everything went swimmingly, and we attribute much of that to SubBus, our bus provider who coordinated all of our bus routes without a hitch and offered incredible pricing. VandyHacks, without hesitation, recommends reaching out to SubBus to any other hackathons interested in sending buses out to bring hackers to events.
Diversity and Inclusion
Alongside cultivating a welcoming technology community at Vanderbilt University and ensuring VandyHacks IV was a beginner-friendly event, our other primary focus for 2017 was promoting diversity and inclusion both within Vanderbilt’s technology community and in the hacker community at large.
Efforts to promote diversity and inclusion exist throughout the tech industry, spur incredible amounts of conversation, and, in the past few years, have become more effective. VandyHacks wholly supports the notion of a more diverse technology community; technology is spurred by innovation, and innovation comes from all places. By ensuring more individuals feel included in this community, we introduce a plethora of new ideas that we may not have had before and, in turn, produce greater levels of innovation and unique solutions to existing problems.
Over the past year, Vanderbilt University’s Women in Computing chapter has skyrocketed in efficacy, and VandyHacks has partnered with WiC as often as possible. Together, we’ve been able to promote the same message to women in Vanderbilt’s technology community: you are welcome here.
VandyHacks is most certainly proud of the 22% of our attendees at VandyHacks IV that are women, but this is far from true equality in the hacker community. We do recognize that continued progress is critical, and our first steps are to work with the leaders of Vanderbilt’s Women in Computing chapter to help us learn how.
Diversity and inclusion extends beyond gender, however. Racial and socioeconomic diversity are typically lacking throughout the tech industry.
While VandyHacks hasn’t been able to tackle all the challenges of racial diversity with our events, we do everything we can to ensure hackers of all colors and backgrounds feel welcome at our events by abiding by Major League Hacking’s Code of Conduct and responding to incidents appropriately.
We do hope that VandyHacks has been able to tackle socioeconomic challenges within the hacker community by following the status quo of hackathons not placing financial burden on attendees. We do everything we can to provide or reimburse means of travel to and from our event, provide meals and sleeping accommodations throughout the weekend, and wholly focus on providing hackers everything they could possibly need — free of charge — to learn, build, and share amazing technology.
Venue
VandyHacks IV was the first time that VandyHacks has been hosted in the same hacking space as a prior event. VandyHacks sincerely thanks the Wond’ry, Vanderbilt University’s epicenter for innovation and entrepreneurship, along with the attached Engineering and Science Building, for providing their state-of-the-art spaces as a venue for both VandyHacks III and VandyHacks IV.
Being in the same venue meant we knew exactly where we could fit certain numbers of hackers, what spaces were ideal for workshops, and we weren’t caught off guard by the building itself. Additionally, we were able to optimize our usage of the space and learn from our past experiences. For example, optimizing food lines is a particularly present issue for hackathon organizers, but we were able to rearrange our setup for VandyHacks IV and have a nearly seamless experience with hackers getting food during the several meals provided throughout the weekend.
VandyHacks IV is also the first time that we used the same opening ceremony venue two years in a row — Vanderbilt University’s Langford Auditorium. Thanks to our familiarity with those who operate the facility as well as the facility itself, we had an incredibly smooth opening ceremony with zero problems.
MLH Survey
After our event, Major League Hacking sent out a survey to our attendees asking them to rank various attributes of our event. Below are the results of this survey.
All of these ratings are where we expected them to be. Our lowest rating, referring to our closing ceremony, came in at 3.07/5.00 — this is likely due to delays during our closing ceremony due to A/V issues.
Overall, the average rating of all of these attributes is 4.00/5.00, with which we are most certainly pleased. Additionally, the average response to the question, Would you recommend VandyHacks to a friend or colleague?, was 8.47/10.00. We’re also very happy with this response, and hope to see some of our hackers’ friends and colleagues next year!
Press Releases
Here are some links to press releases about VandyHacks IV:
Conclusion
All in all, the VandyHacks team is proud of the work that went into organizing VandyHacks IV and pleased with the results. We look forward to VandyHacks V in fall 2018 and improving even more throughout the next year to bring the best experience possible to our hackers.
Thanks for reading, and happy hacking!
