Member-only story
How Five High-Schoolers Won $9.5K From Hackathons in One Summer
Coding, winning prizes, and proving ourselves
Authored by Ayaan Haque, Adithya Peruvemba, Viraaj Reddi, Sajiv Shah, and Ishaan Bhandari.
Background
Let’s start with a quick disclaimer: We say $9.5k, but most of the prizes are actually virtual credits from various tech companies. In terms of tangible prizes,(e.g. AirPods), we won about $3k.
But enough about our inflated numbers! Let’s get to the story.
We go to Saratoga High School. As a Bay Area school and top-15 STEM high school nationwide, it’s known for its competitiveness and high academic levels.
This competitiveness has created a highly toxic environment, with students prioritizing college admissions over everything, including mental health and friendship. This intense culture has led to people refusing to work with others, simply because they don’t want their peers to have an advantage in college apps. Our team frankly detests this culture. While we appreciate the competitive spirit, we found it insane that people’s priorities were so skewed. Ayaan, who had previous hackathon experience, suggested we all go as a team and win, simply to show that we could be successful while not feeding into the toxic culture.
It may seem an odd mindset, but it’s the truth. We had a chip on our shoulder and wanted to prove that we didn’t have to sacrifice our friendships and collaborative spirit to boost our accomplishments.
Little did we know what would come next with just a bit of hard work and intuitive thinking. We decided to reflect on our summer and discuss how we personally grew from our experience while providing some tips and tricks on how to grow as a team and as hackathon contestants.
Exposition
Our story began one April afternoon, after a monotonous day of online school. Ayaan, who had previous hackathon experience, reached out to the rest of us, who had a sprinkled interest in CS. The five of us agreed to work together for one weekend on a relatively small hackathon called StanHacks. We had nothing to lose by participating, and even though our coding skills weren’t very polished, we thought there…
