Meet Hack Western 10’s Co-Directors
It’s finally time for…
Hack Western 10 🎉! This year marks an extraordinary milestone for our hackathon. Over the last 9 years, Hack Western has continued to grow a community and impacted countless hackers across the country. Of course, we plan to make this year our best one yet!
Introducing Hack Western 10’s Co-Directors, Charlotte Lemon and Maaz Siddiqi! We’re so excited to kick things off and wanted to start by letting all of you in on the vision for the upcoming year.
Maaz: Hey everyone! I’m Maaz, an incoming 3rd year in Computer Science. Fun fact, I actually started at Western in BMOS, hoping to pursue accounting. I switched right after the first semester. I’ve always done a little bit of coding on the side out of interest, so I decided to fully commit to it as a career too. Despite switching majors, I decided to take another business class this year, and really liked it! Initially, I had a goal to pursue a career in Software Engineering, but now I would also love to start my own tech startup someday as well. Look out for the next unicorn 😤
This will be my 2nd year on the Hack Western team as well! Last year, I was a Web Organizer, and met some really talented coders. It was my first time building websites that would be used at such a large scale. I truly enjoyed the atmosphere around the whole team last year, so it’s an honour to be chosen to lead this milestone year of our hackathon!
Charlotte: Hi! I’m Charlotte and I’m going into my 3rd year studying business. I’m in love with product/UX design and the intersections of business, design and data. I was a Design Organizer on Hack Western last year and worked on cool designs for our swag, social media, and web projects. It was so fun to see my designs come to life at our in-person event. I also represented Hack Western last year at MLH’s Hackathon Organizer Conference, Hackcon, and learned strategies to plan the best hacker experience possible. I’m looking forward to attending again in New York this year and meeting even more amazing people in the hackathon space. I’ve received a lot of mentorship and fun opportunities through Hack Western, and I’m honoured to be Co-Director this year. Can’t wait to hold the best Hack Western yet 💜
What do you like most about organizing Hack Western?
Maaz: For me, I really enjoyed getting to know everyone on the organizing team and working together everyday to build such an incredible event. Each one of them became on of my close friends, and I’m super excited to learn more about our new members on our team this year! We shared so many laughs and had a great time hosting the event itself, it made organizing the event really fun.
As the hackathon began, and I saw the massive line at registration, it really set in how large of an event our team was planning. The air during registration is certainly a surreal feeling. A calm before a weekend of sleeplessness and networking mania. watching it all unfold during judging. Although I was nervous, I was confident each of the hackers will have a great experience knowing how hard our talented team prepared for the event.
So Hack Western 10…what can we expect?
Maaz: Although it’s still very early, our organizing team has been hard at work to make this year as memorable as possible! There’s lots we’d love to share right now, but it’ll make this too long. Here’s what we can share: Hack Western 10 will take place between November 24th-26th, 2023. We also will host a pre-weekend event the week prior, November 17th-19th, 2023, full of workshops, panels, and games.
Last year, we had a Zero-to-Hero pre-week. This year, we chose to condense this event to a weekend prior to the hackathon. This will give hackers a chance to attend more workshops and improve their skills for the hackathons while avoiding conflicts with any classes during the week.
Lastly, rest assured the hackathon weekend will be filled with exciting activities and breaks for hackers to relax. While we can’t mention all of our activities, I will say that we will surely continue the MLH Cup-Stacking competition (Charlotte and I won last year 😤).
What’s the theme for Hack Western 10?
Charlotte: Our theme this year is Overnight Campfire 🏕️ We were inspired by the memories and fireside conversations that develop by campfires, as we look back on a decade of event planning and innovation. We’re so excited to make our anniversary year a special one and to elevate the hacker experience. Our team has so much in store!
Stay up to date with us on social media for more about what we’re up to this year 💜
