Karan Agrawal

My first hackathon experience that I had was in my sophomore year of engineering. Hack in the North, India's biggest student-run hackathon conducted by IIIT-Allahabad which was in its 3rd edition in 2018. I applied with one of my friends in college and we got selected. As it was my first ever hackathon experience, I was quite intimidated by the sheer atmosphere but at the same time, overwhelmed by the kind of spirit that students had during the opening ceremony. When the hackathon kicked off, we started working on an idea in the VR domain. But 6 hours into the competition, things started to break. Debugging was getting tougher, and nothing was working. People came in teams of 4 and were working on their projects and we were just 2 and were still stuck on resolving package issues. A mentor suggested that we work on something different altogether as it wasn't that late and we took his advice. We came up with a new idea for a project, a video summarizer that takes a video and condenses it into a shorter summarized video. We built it into a product in 24 hours and gave a good presentation. We ranked 5th among the top 7 winning teams and I couldn't believe myself. I learned a lot of things and met a lot of new people and made it the best possible experience for me.

Being a part of such a dedicated and huge community at this hackathon will only increase my love for technology and enable me to meet with new people and learn what they're working on and gain insights from their journeys and experience and in turn, help me chart a course for myself.