Summer of 2022 was a very eventful period for me. I met a lot of new people, made some good friends and learnt some really valuable lessons. Taking part in JP Morgan's Code for Good was an integral part of those experiences. But, the weird part is, I never went into the competition thinking that I'd win it. I remember talking to one of my teammates about how I entered the competition for stickers (dying from cringe while writing this ðŸ˜). So what really happened in there? Let's break it down.
Everything began in February when JP Morgan & Chase visited our campus to conduct a placement drive. It was facilitated by our University but if they don't visit your campus, you can check for updates on their official website.
The drive started with an online test. It was on Hackerrank and the questions required basic knowledge about DSA. It isn't difficult to crack. The next round was an online interview on HireVue. It was awkward because it had two pre-recorded questions and I was given two attempts to record the reply. I included, in my answers, personal experiences and situations where I solved real life problems. In my opinion, simply boasting about your technical skills or your internships won't be enough to crack the interview round. After this, I was shortlisted to participate in the Code for Hackathon.
As I mentioned earlier, I was really casual about the whole hackathon. Mostly because I didn't have any idea about what happens in Code for Good. I'm fairly good at full stack web development, so, I didn't put extra time in preparing for the Hackathon. Yet, in the middle of the night of the hackathon, I was fighting sleeplessness, headache and all sorts of difficulties. Why the sudden change in attitude?
With two days to go for the hackathon, we were allocated our teams. Every member was from a different University. My teammates were Shria Guntunur, Aayushi Talwar, Manika Ahuja, Nazreen Sheikh, Preethi Gudla, Radhika Tamankar and Suprit Behera. They are some of the most talented people in the country.
On that night, we discussed about our technical skills over Gmeet. After a lot of discussion, we came to the conclusion that we'd be working with React in front end and Django in backend for building the REST api's. The next day we spent creating a dummy project to check if the idea was feasible or not. Everything worked fine and we were set for the next day.
The big day had finally arrived. The hackathon was being conducted over zoom but my university arranged everything in campus for the participants from our University. 12 NGO's were a part of the Hackathon this year. Each of them had released some problem statements of their own. The teams had the liberty to choose any problem statement, but those will be allotted on first come first serve basis. Each problem statement had a total of 10 teams allotted to it. We chose the problem statement of St. Judes Childcare foundation and we got it.
Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, we build a web application, a mobile application, both with backend connectivity. The demo of the application can be found on this video. It was a monumental effort from all the team members. We stayed up all night to get things done and seeing everyone put so much effort, I started giving everything I had into it. I was in the backend team and I also hosted the api and the application on cloud. After 20 hours of continuous development, the apps were done.
After that, we had to prepare a presentation for our solution. We had to present it in the technical round. In this round, judges verified our progress and clarified some doubts. We were asked some basic questions and out of 10 teams, 2 were chosen for the finals.
In the final round, representatives of the NGO's were there as judges. The top two teams of each problem statement presented their ideas. Our competitors were really good. The came close but at the end, we edged it. We were declared as winners from that problem statement!🥳
Each team members won an iPad and some other goodies from JP Morgan & Chase. The goodies are nice but at the end of the day, I came away with tons of experience and good memories for future. That will be the end. As this is already very big, I'll be writing about how you should prepare for the hackathon in separate blog.
Have a great day!!