Surviving your first Hackathon | by Kim Merritt

As part of your apprenticeship journey, you may find yourself participating in a hackathon. This is an event where a group collaborates intensively to fulfil a project brief during a period which lasts anywhere from a couple of hours to a whole day.

This was my entire knowledge of such events when I arrived at my first in September so I guess you could say I was underprepared. Although I’d been on my Data Fellowship apprenticeship for around six months, I didn’t know what to expect and was worried I wouldn’t be able to make a worthwhile contribution. For anyone who’s having similar concerns, here are my top tips for surviving your first hackathon.

Prepare yourself mentally and physically

As most of what happens during a hackathon is done on the fly, it really helps to prepare yourself mentally and physically ahead of time. Feeling as though you’re not ready to hit the ground running on the day isn’t going to do much for your motivation or morale, so give yourself the best possible start.

Get plenty of sleep the week before and have a proper breakfast in the morning (I’m afraid to say that coffee doesn’t count). It’s also useful to go over the data and project briefs available on Appli.ed to give yourself some awareness of the challenge ahead. Working on an empty battery, stomach or brain won’t benefit you or your team, so make sure you look after yourself.

Get to know your team

Speaking of teams, those participating in a hackathon usually consist of three to five members. It’s therefore likely you’ll be in a group with people you don’t know or haven’t worked with before – and they’ll all be feeling as nervous as you do. Take some time at the start of the event to get to know each other and feel like a proper team before jumping into the work.

My teammates and I decided to share our strengths and the tools we were comfortable with before choosing who’d fill each role. Appointing a Project Manager, Documenter, and Data Handlers really helped us to get started on the project. By the end of the event though, we’d found that we’d each done a little of everything through collaboration. Thanks to Alex, Eva, Patti and Steve for making it a great experience.

Communication is key

One of the biggest lessons I learnt from my hackathon was how important it is to keep communicating. When you feel as though time is against you or an obstacle appears in your project, conversations will move the group forward and involve everyone in the solution. Check-in with your teammates regularly and give them a few words of encouragement if they look like they could do with a boost.

If you spend some time together exploring the brief and coming up with as many ideas as possible, you’ll have plenty to choose from when it comes to deciding which to proceed with as a group. Don’t throw any away though – your Documenter can keep track of suggestions which don’t make the first cut in case you’d like to return to them later. The winning solution could be in there somewhere!

Think about your presentation while you work

Thanks to Steve, our own Documenter, for keeping thorough notes on what we’d been working on right from the start. This put us in a good position when the time came to give a progress update to everyone taking part in the hackathon, plus we had lots of content ready to be incorporated into our final presentation.

Trust me on this: you really don’t want to leave your slides until the last minute. The day can be challenging enough as it is without finding yourself in front of an audience with no idea what to say. Keep thinking about them in the back of your mind while you’re working and schedule some time before the deadline to create the presentation, so your team can go into it together feeling confident.

Be open to learning

A lot of learning takes place during a hackathon, through both the overall experience and being with your teammates. These events are a great way of sharpening your existing skills, discovering new ones, and sharing that experience with others. They’ll give you space to put all that lovely knowledge you’ve picked up during your apprenticeship into practice.

It’s amazing how much you can achieve in a short period when you set your mind to it and are a member of a supportive group. Hackathons are the perfect place to experiment so don’t be afraid to try something new – and don’t be scared to ask for help either. Everyone in that room wants to see you succeed, and you might even be able to answer their questions in return.

Don't be too hard on yourself

Going into the event, I was worried about how much I’d be able to contribute. Imposter syndrome hits us all sometimes and can make us doubt our skills. Keep reminding yourself that you’re there for a reason: no matter where you are in your apprenticeship journey, you will have something of value to add to your team.

It might not go to plan and you won’t necessarily come out of the hackathon with the solution you were hoping for, but there’s always something to be gained from the experience. After five hours of discussion and data analysis, my team had ended up with some straight lines on a graph and we were feeling rather deflated. That was until we realised that no finding was still a finding, and this ended up being the focus of our presentation.

I’ve been lucky enough to see the feedback from our event and it’s really positive. The aspects that attendees highlighted as the best parts of the day were having the opportunity to collaborate with people they’d never worked with before and learning from each other. Celebrating our successes together in the pub afterwards also seemed to go down well with everybody!

After my experience last month, I’m looking forward to the next hackathon scheduled for February. I’m more excited about this one because I’ll be able to go into it knowing what to expect and feeling confident about what’s to come. If you have your first event coming up, I hope you have a wonderful day and get as much out of it as I did.

Thanks to coach Craig for taking photographs on the day, and to Alex for organising the event.
 

Kim Merritt is a Data Fellowship Apprentice at London Business School and is also part of Elevate.