I never expected this to happen in my first semester of B.Tech.
One day, an event poster for Zignasa 2K4 Hackathon was circulated in our unofficial WhatsApp groups. I was curious, so I decided to participate. I asked my father for permission, and thankfully, he supported me. I formed a team with two of my classmates.
While registering, we were asked to choose a domain. Without much thought, I chose “Data Science and Cloud Integration.”
After registration, my teammates asked, “Why did you choose this domain?”
I had no answer.
Getting permission from the college was difficult, but our class teacher and another faculty member supported us, and finally, we reached the hackathon venue.
Everything felt new — the campus, the people, the environment, and the hackathon culture. We didn’t know
- What to build
- Where to start
- How to choose a problem statement
Our first task was selecting a problem statement. After a lot of discussion, we chose one related to food adulteration and got approval from the mentor. The next step was finding and cleaning a dataset — and that’s where we struggled badly. We couldn’t make meaningful progress.
It was a 24-hour hackathon. Around midnight, we made a tough decision: we changed our problem statement. This time, we managed to build the backend of our project. We couldn’t deploy it, but we were genuinely happy — we had reached this stage with zero prior experience.
The next day, mentors reviewed all prototypes, and everyone presented their work. Our presentation went well.
In the afternoon, the results were announced. To our shock, our team name was called.
We won 3rd Prize – “Trailblazing Performance” with a cash prize of ₹3000.
That moment was unforgettable.
This experience taught me a powerful lesson:
- You don’t need to be perfect to start something new.
- What matters is curiosity, patience, and teamwork.
I was the team leader, even though I knew nothing about the domain initially. But by stepping out of my comfort zone, I learned so much. This hackathon sparked my interest in machine learning and data science, and today, I aim to become a Data Scientist.
If I hadn’t taken that first step, I wouldn’t be who I am today.
"Every big goal begins with a small experience."
#HackathonExperience #FirstSemester #DataScience
#LearningByDoing #TeamWork #Curiosity #GfGConnect