A couple weeks ago I went to my first hackathon with the intention of trying something new and having a cool experience (even though I had two midterms the following week, better choices could've been made). Unfortunately, overall, it wasn't a super great experience.
I had worked on many teams before, robotics teams, online project teams, general group projects, and I forgot that the trials and hardships associated with those projects would also apply to the Hackathon. So I ended up being a little disappointed when the team I found myself in wasn't even half as motivated as the other teams I had formed in real life.
I am a chemical engineering student, and I quickly realized that most of the people who were at the Hackathon were computer science students. It made me feel quite out of place, and the "recruitment" and mentors available there just didn't work with me, unfortunately. However, I have had experience with programming. I've worked in javascript, python, java, html, matlab, and I touched ruby for about a day, but it's never been in depth. Since it has always been learning a different language from scratch and learning what a variable and a for loop is five times over. So I (naiively) assumed that my team members (who are junior and senior computer science students) would be a bigger contribution to the project than me. I ended up being one of the (two) main coders for the project, and our final product both fell short of our plans (we ended up presenting our wireframe during the symposium), and was underwhelming compared to the websites I had thrown together two years earlier.
While it overall was a bad experience, I didn't come out of it shunning coding, if anything, I became more excited about programming. After the experience, I decided that I wanted to start a coding project, a sort of "choose your own adventure" that runs on websites from github (it sounds extremely clunky now that I'm saying it out loud, but it seems fun nonetheless). And I found out about a second Hackathon happening a couple weeks later that I applied for.
I'm hoping for my next Hackathon that the workshops will provide more learning for me and that the final project ends up being something cooler than what I made a couple weeks ago. And while I'm not a computer science student, I'm hoping that maybe these hackathons will provide some good use for me in my professional career.
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