How Hackathons Helped Raj Sudharshan Level Up His Skills
When Raj Sudharshan, 26, entered the Master of Science in Information Systems — Bridge, a technical program at Northeastern University for students without a computer science background, he was impressed by some of his classmates’ skills. “I saw that some students were already very good at programming and proficient in stuff like algorithms and machine learning,” he explained. “I knew I had to improve.“
He also knew that he learned best through hands-on experience, especially when tackling real, practical issues. Since co-op opportunities were for later in his course of studies, and freelancing wasn’t practical (due to the program’s intense coursework and the restrictions on off-campus work for international students), he turned to the next best thing: hackathons.
Participating in hackathons
His first experience was at a data science competition in North Carolina. “We had 24 hours to solve the challenges that the company [data analytics firm Torqata] brought us. We had to work through the night to find solutions,” he said.
His solutions must have been good, and his skills better than he had imagined, because Torqata offered him an internship two months later. “Unfortunately, due to personal circumstances, I couldn’t take up the offer, but I loved the experience and was grateful that Northeastern sponsored our trip and stay,” he said.
Raj Sudharshan and his teammates at the Torqata hackathon in North Carolina
After that, he was hooked. Through Devpost, a platform that lists virtual and in-person hackathons happening around the world, he found out about new competitions to participate in and invited others to join him.
Throughout his time as a student, he and his friends competed in nearly ten hackathons, each one sponsored by a different organization and centered around a different theme.
Last year, they placed second in one with a tech solution for parents. “Our team built a location-based emergency alert system to notify a parent in real-time when a child moves outside a defined radar,” Raj explained. “We had a lot of fun but also learned a good deal.”
Hashtag Holidays
A few months before graduation, he signed up for a hackathon focused on two subjects he wanted to learn more about: machine learning and AI. “Since OpenAI and ChatGPT came out, every job opportunity seems to require knowledge in these areas, so I thought, let’s learn AI. Let’s build something and gain new skills in the process,” he said.
The challenge was to create a search engine or a chatbot using a combination of three personal datasets. Raj came up with Hashtag Holidays, a chatbot that helps users pick their next travel destination based on their liked and saved Instagram posts, search history, places recently visited, and departing location.
“Essentially, what it does is analyze your Instagram liked and saved posts, extract the place names in the captions and store them in the database, then verify them against your browsing history,” he explained.
The chatbot adds more weight to the destinations the user has Googled in addition to liking on Instagram, integrates data from Google Maps API to refine the results, and provides a list of five recommended destinations based on how far the user says they are willing to travel.
Raj working with his team during a student hackathon on the Northeastern campus in San Jose, CA
Learning new skills
Although Raj created Hashtag Holidays with a particular hackathon in mind, developing the project took slightly longer than he expected — eight days total, meaning he missed the deadline by one day. But the concept caught the attention of Northeastern professors and students (he presented it at the Silicon Valley campus Open House), and he learned new skills in the process of building it.
“This was the first project where I used machine learning techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Named Entity Recognition (NER), which gave me an idea of how to work with models and data science,” he said.
Raj presenting his work on Hashtag Holidays at the Silicon Valley campus Open House
Raj would love to develop Hashtag Holidays into a fully-fledged app, but right now, he’s focused on finding a full-time job as a backend developer or a DevOps, having just recently graduated from Northeastern.
As he looks back on his first days in the program, he’s confident that the time and effort he put into projects inspired by hackathons paid off. “Hackathons have deepened my understanding of project deployment. Because I deployed most projects in the cloud, I now know how to use cloud services, especially AWS,” he said. “I can one hundred percent say that these experiences shaped me into the capable developer that I am today.”
Learn more about Hashtag Holidays on YouTube and GitHub; connect with Raj on LinkedIn.