How do you raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, design the merch that defines half of campus fashion, build software that powers hackathons from around the world, and do everything else necessary to run a thousand-person hackathon? 

My friends have gotten sick of me yapping about HackMIT, the club I sold my soul to at the beginning of freshman fall and am now the director of. HackMIT is a club that helps facilitate Hacking⁠01 i fully admit that i may have been slightly clickbait with the subtitle… anyways we still hack mit ! in a way. in its most conventional form: we hold a hackathon, where you spend 24 hours⁠02 occasionally 36 hours for some other hackathons. the point is that this is a weekend where you spend a short amount of time trying to build a project and a long amount of time recovering from the all-nighters you pulled building a project in CS and/or hardware. We run two hackathons every year — one in the spring for high schoolers (called Blueprint, and if you’re a high-schooler you’re eligible to apply!), and one in the fall for ~1000 undergraduates. Our Fall hackathon, aka HackMIT, is the biggest hackathon at MIT and one of the biggest in North America.

one of our many stunning banners

When I began writing this post, I realised that in fact HackMIT was more famous on the blogs than I had remembered.⁠03 seems I was not a very dedicated follower of the blogs; my days spent poring over the blogs somehow skipped over the many many mentions of HackMIT. RIP However, most people haven’t talked about the process behind planning a massive event like this. Given that I’m crunched for time,⁠04 oopsies I procrastinated on writing this blog and now it’s an entire month late and I promised everyone and myself that I would get this out by fall break AHHHH and then i spent way too much time battling wordpress to get this out so it's a little over for me I’m going to do a mind-dump-way-too-comprehensive-distinctly-personal version of a “How to put on a thousand-person hackathon in six months” guide. Here we go! 

Part 1: spring into summer⁠05 so this is a lizzy mcalpine lyric shoutout to her even if vibes of the song are very different from our hackathon LOL

As I noted previously, I sold my soul to HackMIT at the start of freshman fall. I was head of Corporate Relations for our Blueprint hackathon, and had a pretty good time. Sent a few hundred emails, infiltrated a few Parents of Massachusetts Facebook Groups, and both memed and was memed on at the hackathon itself. 

one of the memes they made; i think the kids liked me… maybe.

For some surprising reason I decided that I did not hate the hours and hours I’d poured into this club, so I ran for director during elections and bound myself to a 1.5 year commitment to being director of HackMIT. LOL! 

me and my girls Maggie L. ‘27 and Alison S. ‘27 during elections. we’re spelling out YAP in case this wasn’t clear

some team members who are still not acquainted with my background.. very sad

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We generally start planning for the hackathon around early April, when we recruit our Spring class ⁠06 plural for new members who join the organising team and onboard them. We begin planning website designs, brainstorming improvements for our judging/registration infrastructure, and thinking about application logistics. We’re trying to paint a picture of the hackathon that we’re going to make happen in five to six months’ time, and for many of us who only vaguely experienced hackathons beforehand, this is pretty hard! 

I admit I am not a hackathon connoisseur — HackMIT was actually the first proper hackathon that I ever went to. I definitely felt nervous about leading the club, even if I had helped organise Blueprint beforehand, and I spent a lot of time with my co-director Albert T. ‘26 to try and understand the vision we wanted everyone to share. 

MIT’s spring term ends in May. Our fall term begins at the very start of September, and our hackathon usually happens mid-September. If you do the maths, this means that we have only 1.5 months when everyone is on campus, and the remaining work is done virtually. This is, unfortunately, PAINFUL. If you don’t remember the horrible times of online school back in 2020, think timezone differences, internet (dis)connections, and Z*OM’S CONSTANT NEED TO UPDATE.⁠07 I love zoom though they are very cool and carry my club please sponsor us in the future I learned how to dial-in while travelling and how to inconspicuously eat my dinner at 9pm with my camera on. 

Still, we had a lot of fun — I learned a lot about what people’s favourite animals and boba orders were, and we learned all the different ways to send reactions and stickers over Zoom. It was incredible seeing everyone put in so much effort despite their busy summers; we read over 3000 applications and launched our website and our annual CTF puzzles and managed to get everything going as smoothly as we could. I still remember when we launched our website — so many people messaged us raving about the Starry Skies theme that we had designed this year. It takes a star-studded team to build a starry-themed hackathon, I guess.

Splash is our name for the website, HackMIT.org. This is my co-director and marketing head and I talking about how they both dreamed about the website the day before launch!

you know you’re cooked when the first thing you check on your flight with free wifi is your 30 unread slack messages. we also look like rats because we’re on the plane, but with that said, meet my lovely corporate relations head Claire W. '27 who was also checking slack!

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Part 2: T-14

Summer slipped by through the ceaseless flow of meetings and emails. I landed after my six hour flight from London and dropped by BC FLEX⁠08 BC FLEX is a chance for all the freshman of Burton-Conner to meet all the floors and decide which floor they might want to spend the rest of their college dorm life on as soon as I arrived on campus; the overwhelming number of fresh faces and scheduled events told me welcome home in the most MIT way possible. One must imagine this metaphorical firehose⁠09 there is a lot of lore about life at mit being like drinking from a firehose! to be refreshing, even if the heat meant that I would’ve preferred a physical firehose instead.⁠10 one day i will be bold enough to figure out whether the physical firehose in stata is actually drinkable  

As you might remember, HackMIT happens mid-September. So when I landed on campus, the clock for Hack was ticking down: we were at T-14. We staffed our booth at Midway⁠11 midway is the activity fair where freshmen (and sneaky non-freshmen) eat a lot of free food, take a lot of free merch, and talk to clubs on campus about potentially joining their club to entice encourage the frosh⁠12 freshman / first year / those who are free from the chains of grades, etc. to come to our information sessions (shoutout to everyone who came and sacrificed their voices to talk nonstop for ~2 hours), ran our information sessions with the classic “FREE BOBA” marketing technique, and spent the final weekend before HackMIT interviewing people to select our incoming fall class. 

This was definitely a lot of work, but also a LOT of fun. I loved talking to everyone about why they were interested in joining HackMIT, and I will always be so grateful that so many competent and passionate people applied to join the organising team, even if it made our deliberations last over three hours. There were tough decisions and tense moments, but I’m very proud and excited for our Fall babies to work hard in Hack!

we name our recruitment classes something different every year. here’s a sneak peek into our decision process, except we gave up because some service we shall not name went through some interesting personality development, so i took matters into my own hands.

we welcomed the fallabies into hack! they are hopefully grateful about the fact that they are the fallabies and not the… fallouts… or something else

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So we recruited our Fall class. T-7. We hit our fundraising goals and confirmed the scheduling. Everything was getting REAL. The weather was getting GREAT (as opposed to the awful rainstorm weather last year). Unfortunately, my co-director got SICK, but it’s okay because he survived with two days of intense sleeping, various medicines, and some soup I made (which was clearly an integral part to his speedy recovery). The last few days flew by; we chalked the sidewalks, flagged the lightpoles, and postered everywhere. Our 7000 bottles of Soylent arrived and we made sculptures out of them. People started milling around campus lugging travel suitcases and asking for directions to Lobby 7. In the blink of an eye, it was now September 13th. T-1.

peep the lightpole flag in bad lighting

shoutout to our marketing head Kimberly W. '26 for designing this in an hour with two days' notice

our mas-cat!

we experimented a little with decoration. after all, there was a lot of material to play around with

here is me on top of the boxes for reference

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Part 3: THE HACKATHON!

The night before the hackathon, Albert, Maggie L. ‘27 and I were doing our final setup checks, and Albert and I stuck around to revamp our script before the opening ceremony. We left Stud⁠13 student center, where i reside semi-permanently at 2am, counting how many REM cycles we’d get.  

We began setup at 6am, and by the unprecedented time of 7am on a Saturday morning, we had reached a critical mass of conscious MIT students who were helping us set up. People were lugging our heavy merch boxes over to check-in, Hackers were waiting eagerly in front of the Stud, and you could catch the occasional pink hoodie running around to get sharpies and pins and whatever else people needed. I somehow landed myself three walkie talkies at once (which was more funny than it was useful), and we got everything set up. Our marketing team was decorating the Hacker lounge, which was ADORABLE, and after checking that probably nothing would burst into flames in a way that our team could not rescue, I went to do our sound check at the Kresge Auditorium. 

bright and early for check-in!

inside the check-in tent when people had began setting up... the whole tent smelled like our 1200 bagels

the hackers are coming through now... it's getting busy (pc Dom D. '27)

one of the many beautiful parts of our hacker lounge decor, designed by the Marketing team

a set up that was more fun than it was useful for obvious reasons. pc Maggie L. '27

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Opening ceremony was incredibly emotional for me. To stand on the stage and see everyone — the hackers, the team, the sponsors — was a grounding experience, and I swelled with pride to see how this all happened. Our keynote speaker this year was Annie Rauwerda, the creator behind depths of wikipedia, who had the coolest vibes and delivered a banger opening presentation. Sarah S. ‘27, who was in logs in two contexts at once, made the lovely connection to invite the MIT Logs⁠14 mit’s oldest acapella group. they’re really cool and REALLY talented and you should go watch their incredible musical if you haven’t already!! it was featured by the boston globe and i listen to the originals while studying sometimes to come perform for her HackMIT Logs task.⁠15 logs = logistics  

so surreal. pc Alison S. ’27, our fav resident photographer for Hack <3

apparently annie, like me, was also not a hackathon connoisseur before she came to hackmit. what can i say hackmit is just a pretty good entry point i guess

the logs!

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And then it was the Hacking. For us, at this point, everything was set in motion; we just had to watch everything move like clockwork. The boba and Red Bull was a hit with everyone, the midnight Insomnia cookies were delicious, and I personally LOVED the therapy dogs who came to visit. Shoutout to Angela K. 27 and Jenny Y. ‘26 for compromising on the thousand-dollar petting zoo and getting us free therapy dogs instead <3 Tuxedo Tim (played by the wonderful Selena Q. ‘26) is also a typical major hit. 

THE CUTEST THERAPY DOGS!!

i heard people like red bull around here...

Tuxedo Tim, played by our lovely Selena Q. '26 for two hours straight, is obviously very popular with the organising team too

i love tim too <3 featuring a delicious rose boba we got from tenone tea house!

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I also continued a grand old tradition of being exhausted enough to sleep on a bunch of cardboard boxes as my bed. This year, Allison E. ’27 (a fellow blogger!) and Ojas G. ‘27 also visited me and gave me a much needed Mochinut & Boba break along with the sweetest postcard! I was very touched. I think they were very entertained. 

guys i think she found the fact that i was conked out on a batch of capri suns...

really... really...

funny.

and of course i was very grateful for the food, boba, and sweet postcard. albert was not as impressed with his chicken sandwich, i think

and if you couldn't believe that this is actually a long-standing tradition, here is an intentionally low quality photo of my presentation during our team dinner talking about my arduous history of using boxes as a bed

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At the end of the day, we had to close the venue due to overnight restrictions. After tying everything up and doing a brief checkover of the venue, Maggie, Albert and I had some more judging logistics to confirm. Aside from being shorter than Olaf,⁠16 who some rumours put to be around five foot four. also albert and maggie would like to claim their dignity for being (meaningfully) marginally taller but i digress and this is also my blog so my perception is key another commonality we share is the unrealised childhood dream of a sleepover with friends. Adulthood is about being mature and not doing stupid things, but to be mature one must obviously recognise the importance of fulfilling missed childhood dreams. As such, we lugged two of Hack’s many air mattresses into my room, chatted about logistics for Sunday, got sidetracked trolling Claire W. ‘27 (who lives right above me), and staggered our venue check-in shifts so we could each get four (rather than three) hours of sleep. 

Sunday morning was thankfully calm and slightly tense, given that everyone was rushing to complete their final projects. Once the project submission period ended, it was crunch time. People started milling around the tables to present and judge projects alike, and I floated around the help desk to make sure that we were able to redirect lost judges and projects. Once judging concluded, we split off into separate groups to deliberate on decisions. This year, I managed the deliberations of the HackMIT challenge prizes, while my co-director and the Mentor & Judging points Susan H. ‘27, Emily C. ‘25, and Jenny Y. ‘26 finalised the overall prizes. We got everything together, and suddenly we were ready for the closing ceremony! 

so many people... pc Dom D. '27

our very not-jank set up to discuss prizes

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The closing ceremony was a different flavour of emotional from opening. Alison S. ‘27, our resident photography talent and Finance head, spent two hours during the hackathon to edit together a BEAUTIFUL closing ceremony video. She edited “HACKMIT” to parody Chappell Roan’s smash hit “HOT TO GO”, and I’m honestly a little embarrassed to admit how I was tearing up while the song was telling us to touch our toes. Ridonkulous⁠17 MIT’s premier hiphop dance troupe! love donk, and especially our team member Alicia L. '27 who happened to coordinate the performance because she was in charge of the closing ceremony and also dances for ridonkulous did a great job hyping up the crowd, and we did a cute little swag throw (with mixed reception). Our winners were very energetic and it was very cute to see the products demo’ed. I think our projects were very cool this year :) 

the swag throw was of mixed reception. meme credit Albert T. '26 who pulled this together in 5 minutes

some of our winners were very excited. pc our Technique photographer Marcelo M.

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Once everyone had left after the closing ceremony, I blobbed on the floor for a while from exhaustion, and then picked myself up so that we could facilitate cleanup. There wasn’t much left, thanks to the hackers who helped us clean out most of the trash before the closing ceremony, so instead we mostly just had a lot of fun being inefficient with pack up. I relived my Hack ‘23 experience of being carted by Maggie around the Ice Rink (and returning the favour), our Marketing and CR teams made “the Sponsor Shirt” with every single leftover sticker we could find plastered onto a single merch shirt, and we donated a few hundred bottles of Soylent (a feat considering that we started with 7000) and Red Bull to the Banana Lounge. We packed everything up, took our sentimental team photos, and that was the end of HackMIT 2024.

we're all a little tired...

tshirt decoration in progress

it was mostly a lot of fun and only a little bit of screaming

i was a little more rogue with my carting style...

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part 4: the aftermath

Oops, this turned out to be a pretty long post; it’s been a long few months. I’m proud of what we did. We received a lot of appreciation and gratitude, and I genuinely believe our team deserves it. Everyone was great — from our lovely sponsors who ask us about our days to the hackers who help us clean up, it’s always great to know how many kind people are out there! But as I told everyone at our organising team dinner, the team will always have a special place in my heart. 

team photo <3

A lot of people frame college as the time to prepare themselves for the post-college life, but there are also many people at this school who will do something just for the sake of it. The legacy of HackMIT is not something pre-professional — we just hold two 24 hour fun and goofy events every year — but we spend the entire year preparing for them. I could go on and on about the sacrifice and effort that everyone put in, all the late night calls that devolve into gossip sessions and life complaints, all the moments of comedy that feed our private meme slideshow. This hackathon happened because of all of our team’s hard work and I will be endlessly grateful for them, because at the end of the day, they are the people who made it happen. The thousands of emails,⁠18 and here specifically i want to shout out all the email fiends: all of corporate relations who sent over ten thousand emails, and Susan H. '27, Angela K. '27, Jenny Y. '26, Emily C. '25, and Dom D. '27 for dealing with so many of the help requests battling Illustrator for asset designs, all the pull requests and merges. This is my thank you to every team member, for reminding me that we can build a community of people who are all so competent and dedicated to a cause because they believe in it.

Of course, the epitome of the team member comes in the form of our Committee Heads. 

in order: Richard C. '26, Albert T. '26, Claire W. '27, me, Maggie L. '27, Kimberly W. '26, Alison S. '27

spot the difference

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Maggie L. ‘27 has been there for me since day one,⁠19 having met at a random REX smoothie making event on the side of the road... sometimes you really do meet your best friends in the most unconventional situations. i'll always be impressed by her elaborate birthday cards which i have no hope for matching, ever and as the Logistics head she battled through massive spreadsheets and stayed with us for the worst of it. Special shoutout to her for not crashing the car and killing both of us when she drove all the way up from San Jose to meet up with me at Stanford <3 

Claire W. ‘27, our amazing Corporate Relations head, brought so much energy with her crazy ideas to funnel sponsorships. Our conversations about sponsor logistics until 3am, even while both of us were slightly sick and dying in Oxford, definitely pulled through to push us even beyond the fundraising goal. 

Alison S. ‘27, our Finance head, has been another integral part of my HackMIT experience, with her incredible reliability and photography talent. You would think that she is a typical high school junior grinding for college apps with her 7 clubs and 4 exec positions, but her atypical passion and powerhouse-ness drives her through everything to pull off some of the craziest projects I know. 

Andrew L. ‘? and Richard C. ‘26 as our incredible DevOps heads were the unit of all time, and I’ve been so honoured to work alongside them for the entirety of my Hack experience. Their calmness was incredibly anchoring amidst the rest of us hyperactive heads, and I will always remember the number of times when I would wake up and they had pushed out some incredible feature (by virtue of another all-nighter). 

Kimberly W. ‘26, or the insom(a)niac Marketing Head as we love to call her, has the most incredible view on design, and really pushed the branding of HackMIT this year to new (starry!) heights. Her honesty and dedication reminds me of a value system that sometimes the Tech School education overlooks: it is worth it to make sacrifices for something bigger than yourself, because it is meaningful to you and that is enough. She also taught me that in fact you can actually run a whole committee while doing a MISTI ⁠20 MIT’s study abroad programs which are super cool abroad in Armenia, as long as you just… don’t sleep for the most part.  

This leaves the people who cannot be really defined as anything in HackMIT, because in a way they ARE HackMIT. 

i’d just like to point out how i’m basically the same height as him. nothing else

In the context of HackMIT 2024, whenever I say us, it mostly means me and Albert, my co-Director for this year. As co-directors, we operate as a unit and make all our announcements as a collective — we even make three-person group chats to send messages to any individual team member. 

While we were walking back at 3am, after finally finishing up with all the logistics of HackMIT, Albert observed how it’s so funny that every director spends only six months working with their co-director, but it always feels like forever at the end of it. It’s not easy to dedicate 10-20 hours a week to this cause, all 52 weeks of the year, for two years straight — especially at a school like MIT that demands constant excellence through the technical culture and challenging classes. Still, it selects for a specific sort of person, who is willing to confront this risk and give everything to it anyway. I’ve seen many of my other friends who run clubs have this same dedication, and I feel incredibly lucky that HackMIT is structured in a way that we can share the load. 

From personal experience, it’s hard to build truly deep friendships in college. The number of people you meet in college become an incentive to bobble around and meet new people, especially if you’re still young and full of energy. Time is also crucial for friendship, and MIT squeezes the time out of you through painful problem sets and challenging classes. This is not a post about the value of intellectual discipline; what I will say instead is that our workload pushes us to choose and prioritise things that we truly believe in. 

As directors, we choose to work with each other for so long because both of us care about the cause enough to dedicate so much of our college life to it. The mutual respect and admiration it curates builds out friendships that last far beyond College. We were lucky enough to organise a mega-director’s⁠21 where some of the directors from HackMIT’s 14 year history all met up and had dinner together dinner while I was in San Francisco, and it was so awesome to see the legacy of directors who are still good friends to this day because of the time they had spent together. This sacrifice is all worth it, and for me thus far, it was worth it because Albert was there to guide me through both Hack and life beyond this club. I’ve told him this so many times, but again, thank you for everything. I’ll miss him a lot as he enjoys retirement, but we already pinky promised (like 5 times, actually…) that we’d be friends forever and now we’re adults so obviously this promise is now legally binding. 

So, how DO you raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, design the merch that defines half of campus fashion, build software that powers hackathons from around the world, and do everything else necessary to run a thousand-person hackathon? 

You find a family of some of the most talented, dedicated, passionate people you’ve ever met. And then you do it. 

look at the stars / look how they shine for you 
– Coldplay, Yellow ⁠22 this song was the last song we played for closing ceremony. if songs are the carriers of memory i don't think i will ever make as strong of a connection between a song and an event like this

a final shoutout to the entire team for the work they did this cycle, along with the fallabies who went with the flow: adam, akshata, albert, alicia, alison, andrew, angela, anna, annie, claire, darren, dom, eddie, elaine, eleanor, emily, evan, gaurab, izzy, jenny y, jinhee, kat, kimberly, locke, maggie l, magpie l, nathan, nicholas, richard, sabrina, sarah, selena, shreyas, sophie, susan, teresa, timmy, vicky, ashley, avril, edward, jenny j, kevin, lauren, linda, sanjith, sophia, srilekha, stanley, wendy. y’all are the real stars <3