#NonStopHer: “Ideas don’t have to be sophisticated to be winning. Just unique and genuine”, says Harshita Reddy, a student of Computer Science and Data Science enthusiast.
I still get this “is this happening?!” feel every time someone from WiT ACE mails me or mentions this whole hackathon thing because it STILL feels unreal! What a roller-coaster ride it has been! I know that has become an overused phrase, but those words seem to describe our experience quite well!
So it all started when one of my classmates messaged me saying there’s this hackathon he was interested in participating and whether we could form a team (shoutout to WiT-ACE for making it mandatory that girls HAVE to be in the group)
And soon enough, we did form a team, and what a team it was!
Once we sat down to come up with an idea, the guys wanted to go ALL in! They were talking about deep learning, data analysis, and predicting droughts and stuff. I pointed out that maybe we’re dancing on the edge of what is practically possible and what is just good to hear but has many impracticalities. But they said that that is what it would take to win a hackathon! I thought that maybe I was kind of inexperienced comparatively, so we decided to go with their idea. When we were trying to find the datasets needed to implement their concept the next day, we came up with nothing, and were back to square one.
we had a feeling that it just wasn’t, you know, complicated enough to be a winning one
Then we decided to go with one of the ideas that I came up with, but we had a feeling that it just wasn’t, you know, complicated enough to be a winning one. Still, we made a prototype and demo video and submitted our *mediocre* idea and thought that was it.
We didn’t think we would hear back from WiT ACE, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that we made it to level two. Also, I forgot to mention that our discussions were pure CHAOS. We legit had a voice channel named “quarrel” on our discord. For the initial idea submission, imagine how it would have been after knowing that we made it to level 2!
The jury panel of level 2 was quite far from what we expected them to be! Like the presentation and queries were supposed to be over in 15 mins. Still, they almost talked to us for like 45 minutes. A couple of the jury said that our idea was a seemingly different approach to the problem statement. To say that we were shocked would be an understatement; we thought they would be out for our heads!
After this presentation, our outlook on our idea changed. We started trusting it more as we realized that ideas don’t have to be sophisticated to be winning. As long as they’re unique and are formed with genuine thought to tackle the problem statement, it’s all good.
The evening after the presentation, I was asked for a group picture of ours by WiT ACE. I swear to god we went crazy. We had to photoshop ourselves together, and it ended up looking like some still from avengers assemble!
Then we got an email that we were officially in the finals. The voting began for the people’s choice award (with our avengers’ picture representing us… lol). We got to see our competitors and their ideas!
We were stunned to see so many corporate teams. We were competing with professionals! During the prize distribution, we got to know that the judgment for corporates would be separate. Thanks for being fair WiT ACE.
Not only did we end up in the finals of a national hackathon but we actually managed to bag a people’s choice award
Not only did we end up in the finals of a national hackathon but we actually managed to bag a people’s choice award with our *mediocre* or may be *not so mediocre now* idea! And to think that it was our first hackathon ever is just the cherry on the top! Looking forward to participating in many more hackathons because winning/losing aside, it was an unreal experience and we learnt so much! Thank you, WIT ACE, for conducting such a fun learning experience.
Author: Harshita Reddy (2nd year Computer Science student in RMKEC affiliated to Anna University , I would mostly be found in some corner of my house/hostel reading a book. I like to think that I am a data science enthusiast as well.)
Connect with us on: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
