Maryland Wins the Fall 2013 Hackathon Season

Now can we chill out with the cult of the top ten school?<p>I mean it&#x27;s not like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. aren&#x27;t <i>top-notch</i> places, but you don&#x27;t have to have gone to one of those to be good at what you do. They also cost a fair penny and we&#x27;re not all rich or academically-oriented enough to win scholarships.<p>(BTW, I do get it. It&#x27;s a CYA thing. Nobody ever got fired for hiring&#x2F;funding a top-ten grad...)

As a Concordia University Comp Sci student (Located in Montreal) I&#x27;m glad to see that they did so well despite the fact that they only attended the MIT hackathon throughout the whole season (and they were only a team of three).<p>I hope in the future that more Canadian Universities students get involved in events like this as we have an abundance of talented people who have something to prove.<p>Problem being is that most of these events are hard to get to since they are located in the United States.

I went to a couple of these hackathons. Clearly this skews towards the East Coast. A lot of people from Berkeley&#x2F;Stanford and also Southern CA schools like UCLA&#x2F;USC don&#x27;t go to these because of the hassle of flying out, missing class, being exhausted (after a red-eye), etc. Even if your flight is paid for (which is what PennApps did for my ticket). Whereas you&#x27;re going to see much higher numbers for East Coast schools that are near these hackathons.<p>On the flip side, since I&#x27;m at Berkeley, I can just take a 30 min. BART ride to SF if I want to go to a hackathon. It&#x27;s interesting that the collegiate hackathons tend to be on the East Coast, but lot&#x27;s of startup&#x2F;business related ones crop up on the West.

That kid Shariq Hashme from Maryland killed the game all hackathon season. Couldn&#x27;t be more impressed with Maryland&#x27;s headfirst dive into the forefront of the student hacker scene.<p>They were sending buses all across the country every weekend.

It has been an amazing past few weeks. I&#x27;ve met some amazing hackers from around the country and have seen some places that I wouldn&#x27;t normally visit. Congrats to UMD! Can&#x27;t wait for the spring.

I read merit points as what you want and attendance points as what it costs to get those merit points. So if you needed 300 merit points to complete your project, then you could take 92 Columbia attendance units or 4 University of Chicago attendance units. In a lot of cases, it seems to take a lot of warm bodies.

Go Terps! #1

Great that you&#x27;re incentivizing the growth of this student hacker culture. It&#x27;s super productive for these students and can really change lives.

Just trying to be helpful, the word is &#x27;ado&#x27; and not &#x27;adieu&#x27; in the phrase &#x27;without further ado.&#x27;

If the metric is merit point per attendance point, than University of Rochester destroyed everyone, and UMD is pretty average.

Are there any examples of the types of hacks they&#x27;re required to do for these hackathons?

Georgia Tech went from never competing in national hackathons to #15. Props!

UMD earned 666.66 merit points.<p>I report, you decide!