AthenaHacks 2017 Reflections: Stacey Irawan

Meet Stacey! Stacey was an organizer for AthenaHacks 2017 on the Finances team and will continue on with planning AthenaHacks 2018! She’s a rising junior at the University of Southern California studying computer science. She’s an adventurer, ridiculously good at puzzles and riddles, and is a hard core scuba diver.

Favorite moment of AthenaHacks?

While there were some pretty impressive hacks shown during the project expo, some of my personal favorites were seeing people learn something completely new and making a finished project with it. It was amazing to see people just throw themselves completely out there and make something they’ve always wanted to create but never knew how to do.

Advice for those attending their very first hackathon:

Don’t worry too much about your idea, no one is going to make the “next Facebook” at a hackathon. If you don’t have any idea, take the chance to learn a new framework or use the hardware they have available. Whichever route you decide to go just remember that you’ll be working on the idea through the night and sometimes a hilarious, but useless app idea can be more motivating than a more complex one.

Also SLEEP! Don’t feel the need to stay up throughout the whole event. At my first hackathon my team stayed up for most of the night and our presentation was a mess. We couldn’t even play Taboo correctly (our app was a USC-themed version of Taboo) and accidentally showed a joke “About the Team” page I made where I took unflattering photos of my teammates and wrote “Bad*ss MotherF**kers.” Please sleep.

Reassuring words for people just starting out in computer science?

You’re going to meet people who have been coding since they came out of the womb, and I understand that can be intimidating when you’ve just finished printing out “Hello World!” It’s fine to not know as much as the person sitting next to you, because you’re there to learn anyways. I remember hearing conversations between people in my class and wondering what these strange words people were referring to: IDE?, AWS???, Node???? Not knowing the latest and cutting edge framework doesn’t mean you’re behind the game.