Maryland Wins the Fall 2013 Hackathon Season

http://mlh.io/blog/umd-wins-the-fall-2013-hackathon-season-10-15-2013/

50 23 13 years ago

api• 13 years ago

Now can we chill out with the cult of the top ten school?

I mean it's not like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. aren't top-notch places, but you don't have to have gone to one of those to be good at what you do. They also cost a fair penny and we're not all rich or academically-oriented enough to win scholarships.

(BTW, I do get it. It's a CYA thing. Nobody ever got fired for hiring/funding a top-ten grad...)

theyCallMeSwift5• 13 years ago

I've actually been seeing a trend where more and more companies are actually trying to recruit hackers from state schools. I think people are finally starting to get it.

Additionally, I could not be more thrilled with the high number of non-traditional CS schools in the top 20.

munin• 13 years ago

so to be fair, maryland is in the top 15 (for CS, I think it's 14), so it's not really a Cinderella story if you go from thinking about the top 10 to the top 20, now is it...

mbellotti• 13 years ago

It's true, and that's why I think student hackathons are going to become so important in recruiting. It's not about the grades and a fancy name, great talent comes from passion and intellectual curiosity. At these events the differences between the groups that code for fun and the groups that are in CS because they think it means a guaranteed well paying job post-graduation are REALLY obvious.

rza• 13 years ago

If the metric is merit point per attendance point, than University of Rochester destroyed everyone, and UMD is pretty average.

theyCallMeSwift5• 13 years ago

What's really incredible is that Maryland didn't get attendance points for just showing up. They got the points for completing hacks. So over the last 6 weeks, 160 hackers completed hacks at the official MLH events.

rektide• 13 years ago

UMD earned 666.66 merit points.

I report, you decide!

hughdbrown• 13 years ago

I read merit points as what you want and attendance points as what it costs to get those merit points. So if you needed 300 merit points to complete your project, then you could take 92 Columbia attendance units or 4 University of Chicago attendance units. In a lot of cases, it seems to take a lot of warm bodies.

theyCallMeSwift5• 13 years ago

The big goal of this MLH season was to encourage new hackers to join the existing community. Specifically, attendance points encourage hackers to travel to other universities / hackathons that they might not normally go to and to finish a hack (which is super important). It also incentivizes hackers to find other people at their schools that they can travel and work with.

gailees2• 13 years ago

and it's all about the absolute number of top hackers that you breed. the ratio doesn't matter, it's all about your top teams going head to head.

timtamboy63• 13 years ago

Georgia Tech went from never competing in national hackathons to #15. Props!

dsugarman• 13 years ago

Go Terps! #1

zan2434• 13 years ago

Great that you're incentivizing the growth of this student hacker culture. It's super productive for these students and can really change lives.

Yhippa• 13 years ago

Are there any examples of the types of hacks they're required to do for these hackathons?

yefim• 13 years ago

There's no required list, but here's the list of all PennApps Fall 2013 hacks: http://pennapps.challengepost.com/submissions

And a list of all MHacks Fall 2013 hacks: http://mhacks.challengepost.com/submissions

And a list of all HackMIT Fall 2013 hacks: http://hackmit.challengepost.com/submissions

hackNY Fall 2013: https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/fall-2013-hackny-stu...

HackRU Fall 2013: https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/hackru-fall-2013/hac...

eddiezane• 13 years ago

It has been an amazing past few weeks. I've met some amazing hackers from around the country and have seen some places that I wouldn't normally visit. Congrats to UMD! Can't wait for the spring.

gailees2• 13 years ago

That kid Shariq Hashme from Maryland killed the game all hackathon season. Couldn't be more impressed with Maryland's headfirst dive into the forefront of the student hacker scene.

They were sending buses all across the country every weekend.

syswsi• 13 years ago

As a Concordia University Comp Sci student (Located in Montreal) I'm glad to see that they did so well despite the fact that they only attended the MIT hackathon throughout the whole season (and they were only a team of three).

I hope in the future that more Canadian Universities students get involved in events like this as we have an abundance of talented people who have something to prove.

Problem being is that most of these events are hard to get to since they are located in the United States.

theyCallMeSwift5• 13 years ago

There was definitely a noticeable presence from Canadian hackers this season. Waterloo and Toronto are both in the top 20 schools actually.

MLH will be working with those schools and potentially others to get some Canadian hackathons on the roster for the spring.

mattdotc2• 13 years ago

Just trying to be helpful, the word is 'ado' and not 'adieu' in the phrase 'without further ado.'

theyCallMeSwift5• 13 years ago

Good catch, thanks!

mattdotc2• 13 years ago

No problem, I was guilty of the same error myself until I got curious enough to look it up.

...and that's what happens when you ignore other studies in favor of STEM :P

argonaut• 13 years ago

I went to a couple of these hackathons. Clearly this skews towards the East Coast. A lot of people from Berkeley/Stanford and also Southern CA schools like UCLA/USC don't go to these because of the hassle of flying out, missing class, being exhausted (after a red-eye), etc. Even if your flight is paid for (which is what PennApps did for my ticket). Whereas you're going to see much higher numbers for East Coast schools that are near these hackathons.

On the flip side, since I'm at Berkeley, I can just take a 30 min. BART ride to SF if I want to go to a hackathon. It's interesting that the collegiate hackathons tend to be on the East Coast, but lot's of startup/business related ones crop up on the West.

Maryland Wins the Fall 2013 Hackathon Season

Related Stories