The UC San Diego Office of Innovation and Commercialization is pushing hard to get more students involved in entrepreneurial efforts on campus, including via hackathons. To that end, the office's Lynsey Fitzpatrick interviewed two CSE students who developed the university's first major hackathon from scratch in 2015 and 2016. The inaugural SD Hacks event was organized by Ryan Hill in September 2015, and he stepped aside as leader for the second SD Hacks, which was led by Yacoub Oulad Daoud (far right, with Hill at left), who had previously worked under Hill on the first hackathon. In an online interview, Oulad Daoud said that the number of projects grew from 77 the first year to 100 projects in 2016. "The number of applications also grew to over 4,000 from 3,000 in 2015," said Oulad Daoud. "People apply from everywhere, but most of our students are from California." Of the 4,000 applicants, only 1,000 were invited to participate in the weekend-long event that ended on October 1, 2016.
According to SD Hacks founder Ryan Hill, for the inaugural event last year, "none of us really understood the scope it would be... Some vendors and sponsors were reluctant to work with us, because it was a big project and we didn't have a track record to back us up. We proved that we could organize an event of this scale, and that alone was huge."
While it was much easier to recruit competitors and sponsors for the 2016 event, another major challege was sustainability. "Sustainability is tricky when you're talking about an organization that changes leadership every year," said Oulad Daoud. "This year's event might be over, but there's still work to be done to make it easier for next year's directors. I'll be working until the end of the year to document my work from this past year in a coherent format for directors to use going forward." Next year's principal organizer joined the group in 2015 and was deeply involved in this year's event, so the succession of SD Hacks leadership is firmly in place.
Oulad Daoud also noted that mentors played a major role in supporting students to build their projects in 36 hours. "We had around 40 mentors," he noted. SD Hacks also brought in two alumni speakers, including CSE alumna Sarah Guthals (Ph.D. '14), co-founder of ThoughtSTEM, and Scott Chacon, co-founder and CIO of GitHub, a 2002 alumnus of the Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts program at UC San Diego. "I think it’s cool when students realize that all of these amazing people graduated from UC San Diego," added Oulad Daoud. "Students are still learning, and alumni can help inspire them and connect them to the right resources. We hope to tap into our alumni community even more next year since it seems to really benefit our participants."
Read the full interview, "Hack It Better", on the UC San Diego Research Affairs website.