Copy of the apple website that I created

                                                                                        Copy of the apple website that I created

But just before the hackathon, I started freaking out. What if I don’t know enough? Why would they want a kid on their team?

I learned some key lessons that completely changed the experience I had at the hackathon, and they hopefully help you with any hackathon you go to 😉 :

  1. What I know/don’t know vs. How can I learn a shit ton

This so so 🔑, I can’t even emphasize how important this is. I feel like everybody that is going to a competition or hackathon, feels like they need to know everything in order to be valued or add to the team I had this mindset for the longest amount of time, and all it did was increase my stress levels over the competition. After talking with people who’ve been to hackathons and what they thought, I reflected and realized that I’m literally one of the few high school kids there and none of my peers could even think about attending such an exclusive event. After that, all I could think about is how I’m going to be hungry to learn for my whole three days there and come out with new experience and knowledge.

😕 → 🤯 (my brain before vs. after the hackathon)

  1. Go hard, Go 110%

Throughout this entire challenge, I put my brain in overdrive and the only thing I could think about for those three days is how I can solve the problem we were presented with. But how do we put ourselves in overdrive, how do we put ourselves at 100% and crush that objective?

Well as simple as it may seem, it’s all focus… and a little bit of Redbull 😉.

Some things that I did to help with my focus is:

Clear anything that you might have to do after the event or even during the event. The fewer things you have to think about, the more brain space to be in the moment.

We’re all not lucky enough to find a super super interesting challenge topic, but something I learned was to milk every aspect of the topic until you find it interesting. I’m passionate about using stem cell therapies to cure disease, so how would I find something like onboarding processes interesting?

I don’t, but something I found weird was how we use the same generic onboarding process to welcome a variety of employees, it just doesn’t make sense. I told my group, and we decided to act on that.

🔑 = being intrigued by something will help your focus last longer, so make everything interesting.

If you have a family like mine, you really can’t go a minute without someone running around or crying about their phone. It’s super easy for me to get distracted when I’m at home, luckily the hackathon venue was open pretty late and early in the morning. Still, you’re going to find lots of distractions at the hackathon itself, the two I found most distracting were: friends and food. Well, what did I do about it?

I moved to a remote area in the workspace and put on some headphones.

Don’t get me wrong, don’t just abandon your group and work on your own. Make sure you’re clear about your role in the group and what you need to work on and then you finish that as fast as you can.