Hackathons Changed My Career. Here's Why You're Not Going to Them.

The night I almost didn't go

Oh man my first hackathon was an intimidating one. This was the beginning of my sophomore year and one of my close senior friends had asked me to join his team. Imposter syndrome hit me hard.

Walking into a room of over 600 people was eye opening. People from different majors all coming together to take part in this challenge and build something meaningful. That day changed my outlook on CS as a major. It actually made me feel like part of a community.

It was Hack OHI/O 2025, my team had decided to do the Honda challenge. So we grabbed as many diet cokes and cookies as we could and got to work. 24 hours to build something that improved students’ lives on campus. We ended up building SeatSense, a library occupancy detector.

Did we end up winning? No.

Was it one of the best times of my life? Absolutely. And it sent me down a path of attending every major hackathon I could find in the Midwest.

What you actually get out of them

Hackathons aren’t actually about winning. While, of course, it is a great accomplishment if you win, the connections that you make at a hackathon are much more valuable. My next hackathon I attended was the College of Medicine Appathon. A 3 week long competition where multiple Principal Investigators came and pitched their ideas and your team had to pick one and build it out over the next few weeks. We chose to build TheoHealth, a chronic illness journaling app.

This hackathon ended up propelling my career to heights I never could have imagined. I ended up setting up a foundation for a startup: https://theohealth.org/. Got my first internship at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and ended up meeting some cracked CS majors that would grow to become some of my closest friends. We placed 3rd in that competition and won $500. Apart from great connections I also got a banger LinkedIn post and something actually meaningful to put on my resume, not just another YouTube tutorial app or twitter clone.

What nobody tells you about actually winning

Everyone walks into a hackathon thinking the best product wins. It doesn’t.

The pitch is 70% of it. The MVP is the other 30%.

Judges aren't engineers reviewing your codebase. They're people who need to be convinced that what you built matters. The teams that win aren't always the ones with the most polished product, they're the ones who can stand up and say: here's the problem, here's why it's real, here's why our solution works, and here's why this isn't just a weekend project.

That last part is what separates winners from everyone else. If you can talk about your hack as something viable long-term, something that solves a real issue for real people, you’ve already won the room before the demo even starts.

Learn to tell the story of what you built. That skill will outlast any hackathon.

One of my favorite hackathon videos came from JacHacks 2026, a hackathon we did this April that was based around this new coding language called Jac. Check out the video here:

Why internationals should care more than anyone

Populating your resume as an International student is incredibly difficult, especially before you get your first internship. You can’t freelance on an F-1 visa. You can’t build websites for clients on the side. The ways most domestic students quietly pad their early resumes? Not available to you.

That’s where hackathons come in.

No visa requirements. No complications. No checkbox asking if you’re authorized to work. Just 24-48 hours to build something real that you can put on your resume, talk about in interviews, and be genuinely proud of. And if you win, you might even pick up some cash.

For international students, hackathons aren’t just fun. They’re one of the most legitimate ways to build your profile before anyone will give you a chance.

Just go to the next one

You don't need experience. You don't need a team. You don't need to know what you're building before you walk in. Hackathons are meant for everyone, from beginners to seasoned vets.

"If everyone waited to become an expert before starting, no one would become an expert." — Richie Norton

Worst case, you don’t win, but you walk away having built something meaningful to you. Best case, it changes the trajectory of your career like it did mine.

Every major university has hackathons running year-round. Find the next one, sign up, and figure the rest out when you get there.

The Diet Coke and cookies are usually free as well ;)

If this resonated, share it with someone who keeps saying they'll go to a hackathon someday. Be the friend who makes them actually go.