So to make you people understand my story I have divided it into 3 parts:- Background, Execution, Outcome so that it will be easier for everyone to understand what went through my mind during each phase.

Background:- Owing to my friend and I being in the first year of engineering there weren’t any special things going around, just that we would mostly spend our time in sharpening our skills in our respective hobbies which was game development and photography. After some thinking we decided to start out by writing articles and technical papers for our college magazine. In the second year of engineering this small contribution of ours earned us a recognition and some selected students were called up by our college faculties to participate in the first biggest technical initiative by the Government of India in 2017 which was Smart India Hackathon’ 2017. It was being planned for many years just that the implementation took some time. So it was obvious for us to not miss this opportunity which would help students like us in many ways because acknowledgement and recognition were in low surplus in our college back then.

SSN Clock

Execution:- Eventually we formed a team of 6 and started to figure out how the competition works and how we can reach the Grand Finale. On grounds of my documentation knowledge my friend suggested me to prepare the document which needs to be submitted in the first round which is also the basis for scrutiny of teams which will proceed further. We gathered information, did research on many technology stacks as well as existing solutions so that we can modify some elements in them or make one of our own. Although we didn’t have much experience in building an industry product we inquired enough to get some knowledge on how to make one and present it on a national level. Our product was a web-app on existing marine species and to have an online portal displaying various properties of several species. We finally submitted the project idea and were waiting for the results. Top 50 teams would be selected all over India for every Ministry which in our case was Ministry of Earth Sciences.

SSN College Campus

Outcome :- They made us wait for over a month and our anticipation kind of faded away and we were pretty sure we didn’t make it to the Grand Finale but in the end of February the results were out and we were selected to compete in the Grand Finale of Smart India Hackathon’17 .We were chuffed to bits at the very own idea that such a young team of computer branch from our college has made it to this level. It wasn’t something which happens daily. Now as we were feeling proud of ourselves we also addressed the fact that the responsibility has also increased with it. We started developing our prototype and in no time it was time for the main 36-hour long Hackathon at the venue allotted which in our case was SSN College of Engineering(Chennai). First round of judging wasn’t bad but our mistakes became palpable in the second round of judgement. There wasn’t much of time left until the third round of judgement. But as they say we learn some things the hard way and that day we understood the phrase “Experience counts“ the hard way as we didn’t make it to the top 5 teams for our Ministry(Earth Sciences). Since we didn’t have any product, marketing, industrial and layman view experience we kind of fell short, however we had made a lot of memories by then and this experience will forever be etched in my mind as the most meaningful initiative I have ever taken up.

SSN Hostel Rooms

Also we were fortunate enough to compete in a college like SSN College of Engineering where the facilities and arrangements for every participant were outstanding. Rooms aren’t a problem as they were very spacious and we were lucky to get accommodation in their newly built hostel building. This again goes to prove one of the reasons why one should participate in Hackathons because you get to witness different types of hospitalities of colleges in India.

Cheers !

PS :- Thank you for the photos Venkatesh Surve. Link for his page is included in the above photos.