I had attended various hackathons before – major ones being code.fun.do & Smart India Hackathon and was part of organizing some small ones organized by the technical clubs in college. In the pre-final year, our team didn’t get selected for Smart India Hackathon, that’s when we came to know about student-run hackathons in India. Honestly, it was a new concept for all of us and seeing the sponsors, plan and all seemed very promising. We applied to various hackathons, got selected, however, we couldn’t attend any of those due to some or the other reasons.

Meanwhile, the semester was near the ending and Core Transfer happened for a Technical Club named IE NITK for which I was part of and we were discussing different possible solutions on how we could make a better impact with our events on the technical community of the college and possibly nation-wide. That’s when I remembered about the student-run hackathons. Definitely, hackathons were great means to make an impact in the lives of the students and the learning curve students get by hackathons is immense and not to forget the experience – one of a lifetime in students’ academic life!

That’s when we pitched about the nationwide hackathon in college to the core members, One of the junior core members raised a question: “Isn’t this too much that you’re aiming?”. I replied saying if so many other colleges could do, why not us? That’s when we faintly discussed a nation-wide hackathon to happen in the college. The initial team was formed of diverse people in terms of skills needed for it to be a national level hackathon and not a small one. That was when I was reading a lot of blogs & resources online to organize hackathons of nation wide scale. Meanwhile, another member in the team, Namrata contacted various friends in other colleges who organized such hackathons to get an idea of the process.

We decided on the following things for HackVerse:

  • Completely free for all hackers
  • Host around 250 hackers from all over India
  • Have some technical talks & workshops
  • Judges & mentors from prominent industry/startups
  • Goodies for all
  • Huge Prizes
  • Great Experience

The aim was to make it the best technical event NITK has ever seen (beat the technical fest – Engineer too), make it the finest hackathon in India.

Since, it’s going to be an event which would happen for the first time, it needed appropriate branding and hence we were pondering over the name and the logo. After discussing over 25+ names, trying out different designs in the logo, we settled up for the name HackVerse and the following logo:

 

More about HackVerse at: https://hackverse.nitk.ac.in/

The hackathon was supported by the Diamond Jubilee Commitee of the college and happened to be an Institute Level Event. HackVerse was a huge success, and it definitely turned out to be one of the biggest and finest student-run hackathon across India. HackVerse offered prizes worth more than 1 crore, got support from 30+ national+international sponsors, 2400+ registrations, had amazing 6 technical talks, was judged by 10+ executives from various multinational companies and startups.

The team was definitely in-experienced in all terms (marketing, publicity, operations, hospitality, etc) for such a big event but the zeal among the members and the aim for which the hackathon was happening kept all of them going and the success had to happen. Cheers to each member in the team for all their contributions!

 


Full team at: https://hackverse.nitk.ac.in/team