A solo trip to the United States and Hackathon experience at MIT[Part 1]
Hello Everyone! This is a medium article about my experience of attending HackMIT 2019. It is a two part article, with the first article giving a brief insight about the selection process and the second part covering my actual experience of participating in HackMIT.
I am Shivay Lamba, a 22 year old guy, hustling and leading an average Indian Engineer’s life. I had quite a boring and nonchalant first three years of Btech. Probably the only experiences worth talking about were my first big internship in an Indian MNC or getting to participate in a few hackathons ( and winning) in 2019 during my 6th semester. But I felt I hadn’t done something that had a WOW factor and I really wanted to experience such kind of a feeling before the end of my college life.
Come 2019, I had participated in a few hackathons and had formed quite a decent network with extremely talented people ranging from GSoCers, speakers at international level tech conferences and I feel, getting to interact with them really opened up a totally new world for me. Till the 3rd year of college I thought that my engineering experiences were just confined to attending college.
One of my friends from college attended HackMIT which is one of world’s most prestigious student run hackathons in 2018 and won there. Throughout my childhood, I dreamed about studying at MIT. So when my friend told me about HackMIT which is an annual hackathon hosted in the month of September every year, I made up my mind that I want to attend it in any way possible.
Registrations for HackMIT begin in first week of July. The standard procedure for applying is by filling an application which asks about your personal details, technical experiences, and a few questionnaires like about your previous hackathon experiences, any impactful projects that you may have built and instances where you have showed leadership qualities. More than 10000+ students across the globe apply for the applications and the selection is limited to about 500 students through the application making it an extremely selective process. Unfortunately I wasn’t selected from the application process.
But there is an alternate way to also get a chance to participate at HackMIT. Every year the organizing team also hosts a special puzzle along side the standard application process. The puzzle involves various computer science based concepts like cryptography, web development, python, machine learning to be used. Last year the entire puzzle was based on the Avengers End Game. It has 5–6 levels, with each additional level unlocked after completion of the previous one. The top 50 students to complete the puzzle are given direct invitation to the hackathon and I was one of those lucky people to get selected. Trust me, I literally spent 12–14 hours for 2–3 days to complete it. But the effort was worth it!
So I got an invitation from HackMIT, step 1 done. But the next biggest thing was to be able to get a US visa. It was already the middle of August, with just 1 month left from the date of the hackathon. I quickly applied and was lucky enough to get an interview date within the next few days. The visa interview went extremely smoothly. And I got my visa by the last week of August.
Originally I was supposed to go with a team of 3 other friends, but with time all of them dropped out due to varying reasons and I was left alone. I then asked my dad, if he could come along, but even he was busy with work. So from having a complete team, I was gearing to travel alone to the United States of America. You see throughout the 21 years of my life, the only places I had traveled alone were within Delhi NCR region. I hadn’t traveled alone to another state within India, yet alone to a country 12000 km away. But anyways I was excited. I booked tickets for 12th September from Delhi to Boston via London ( since I had UK Visa) with a return ticket on 17th September ( Maiden trip to US for just 5 days : yeah I know it sounds crazy, but well there you go).
Come September 10th and British Airways staff was on a global strike with almost all flights getting cancelled. It were days of tension. But anyways the situation got better on 11th September. I had an early morning flight on 12th September from New Delhi. I got my bag and luggage packed and set on for my solo travel. Exciting eh? Well definitely. I felt I was an adult now :P. I reached the airport, got through Immigration pretty smoothly and boarded the flight. First stop was London, a 9 hour flight from Delhi to London.
And finally after a hour and a half’s layover time, I boarded the flight to Boston. After another 7 hours of flight time, the flight finally landed in Boston. I was feeling great, with just a tiny fear of the customs check. But it was extremely smooth. And I came out of the airport at 10:00 pm on 12th September and went straight to my hotel.
Part 2 Coming Soon!
