A thousand student coders drawn from around the country for HackMIT
Where do you find the top 1,000 student hackers in the world? Most of the time, you’d have to go to about 250 colleges in 20 different countries. But this weekend, you can find them all at HackMIT, the new hackathon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
OK, technically it’s not new but “we think of this as the first HackMIT,’’ organizing committee member Ishaan Gulrajani told me when I caught up with him on campus this week. “The last one was like 150 people, mostly MIT students, organized in three weeks relatively hastily. This time we’re kind of doing it for real.’’
Doing it for real meant selecting participants from among thousands of applicants all over the globe. They’re all undergraduates, and college kids are poor, so the committee drummed up sponsorships from about 70 companies — including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Goldman Sachs — to help fly students to Cambridge, where they will compete for more than $10,000 in prizes.
The competition is really secondary, Gulrajani said.
“Let’s be honest: If you’re sleep-deprived and you have 48 hours, no matter how good a programmer you are you’re most likely not going to create something with significant long-term value,’’ he conceded. “Instead, it’s all about getting people inspired. It’s about the whole experience. Hackathons are like a gathering of the herd. All of the other people who are prominent in computer science who are students are going to be at this event.’’
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