Starting a hackathon at a half-built school

When I started high school, I had a choice. I could go to Dublin High, which is established and has everything a high school is supposed to have. Or I could go to Emerald High, which was brand new and still half-built. I picked Emerald.

A new school sounds exciting until you realize what “new” means. There were no clubs. No teams. Nothing that had been around long enough to become a tradition. Without any of that, there wasn’t much to bring people together.

Making something to show up for

I started talking about it with my CS teacher, Mr. Baez, and my friend Arnav. We wanted something that would get people working with people they didn’t already know. What we came up with was AeroHacks, a team engineering competition, and the three of us co-founded it.

The name is a play on our school mascot. It has nothing to do with aeronautics. Given how much I talk about airplanes, I understand the confusion.

For the first year, we partnered with Hack Club. We ran a cybersecurity capture-the-flag and beginner workshops, so you didn’t need to already know how to code to show up. Industry professionals came in to judge.

Then there were prizes, which meant someone had to ask for them. That was me. I cold-called local companies, which is exactly as fun as it sounds, and by the end I’d collected over $4,000 in swag and prizes.

To get the word out, we promoted it through the school newsletter and put up flyers in classrooms. Over 50 students came.

Handing it off

I ran AeroHacks again the next year. Across those two years, we’ve brought in over $14,000 in sponsorships and had 140 students take part. I’ll host it again next spring, as a senior. After that, it won’t be mine anymore.

I’ve been meeting with sophomores and juniors who will take it over after I graduate, so that when I leave, AeroHacks doesn’t leave with me.

What I hope is that it changes. I hope the people running it make it bigger, or weirder, or better in ways I didn’t think of. And I hope that a few years from now, a freshman shows up at AeroHacks, sits at a table with people they’ve never met, and has no idea who started it. That would mean it worked.