It’s 1:30 a.m. An orange extension cord curls out of Carleton Lounge. “It blew out,” an officer tells me. It supplies, or rather did supply, the power for a room of students who flew, bused, trained, or drove in for hackNY’s spring 2013 hackathon.
A hackathon is a 24-hour race to mash your code with other people’s data, and perhaps some hardware, to make something you hope will seem cool and won’t break when you’re onstage the next day, trying to win the approval of nine judges and hundreds of your bleary-eyed peers.
There are prizes—like Sphero, a robotic ball you can control with an Android phone—and money, but nothing more than $1,000. Tumblr and Foursquare are here, as is 4chan’s founder, Christopher Poole, aka “moot.” Most students come with friends; some work alone. Everyone is tired. A student sleeps on a windowsill, a pillow under his head and a pile of clementines at his feet. Another tells me, his blue eyes not blinking, “I’ll sleep whenever I can’t stay awake anymore.”
Twelve hours, 360 Red Bulls, and over 800 cans of soda later, the attendees crowd an auditorium to watch the demos. Some sit on the floor and some wander in and out of the lobby, crushing more free sandwiches into their mouths and backpacks. The smell of BO floats through the back of the room. The boy next to me puts his head in his lap and naps through most of the presentations. He tells me he didn’t sleep last night. His team doesn’t win a single prize.
This is a snapshot of programming at Columbia, where, as in many universities across the country, computer science is booming and hackathons like the one described here are springing up with unprecedented speed. Here, the number of students projected to graduate with a degree in CS has risen 50 percent in the past two years. So has the number of students registered for the introductory class, W1004 (commonly referred to as “ten-oh-four”). On the national level, the Computing Research Association reported an “astonishing” 29.2 percent increase in new computing undergraduate majors.
CS and programming have more widespread appeal than ever before. Startups are frequently acquired for millions of dollars—and sometimes, as in the case of Instagram, for $1 billion. Starting salaries for graduates of top schools are commonly close to six figures. CS has gained cultural appeal through The Social Network, which grossed more than $220 million worldwide. “We’re treated more and more as if we possess superpowers,” explains Sam Aarons, a School of Engineering and Applied Science junior studying CS and the owner of Print@CU. “I can’t even be at a family gathering without somebody asking me if I have any ideas for companies I want to start or if I want to be the next under-25 billionaire.”
Yet the flash and money mask, as they so often do, the sadder stories of loss and failure. Ilya Zhitomirskiy was the co-founder of Diaspora, which once threatened Facebook’s stronghold over social media. Aaron Swartz was arguably one of the co-founders of Reddit and led the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Swartz was 26 when he killed himself. Zhitomirskiy was 22.
This past February, the Engineering student council released a newsletter containing a short paragraph saying that Tejraj Antooa, a computer science student who was not enrolled at the time, “perished on January 24, 2013 near his home in Elmont, Long Island.” The coroner’s office determined the cause of death was suicide. A flutter of Facebook activity expressed grief and anger, but after an aborted attempt to draft a letter criticizing the seemingly slow-acting administration, the formal conversation on campus ended. There was no memorial service. There was no space for discussion. (...)
What follows is by no means the experience of every undergraduate in the CS department. Not everybody is suffering. Not everybody is overlooked. Instead, these stories are meant to show the perspectives of the alienated or underrepresented who, if they are not merely silenced or told they are “wrong,” are placed on a shelf labeled “We’ll get to that later.”
A hackathon is a 24-hour race to mash your code with other people’s data, and perhaps some hardware, to make something you hope will seem cool and won’t break when you’re onstage the next day, trying to win the approval of nine judges and hundreds of your bleary-eyed peers.There are prizes—like Sphero, a robotic ball you can control with an Android phone—and money, but nothing more than $1,000. Tumblr and Foursquare are here, as is 4chan’s founder, Christopher Poole, aka “moot.” Most students come with friends; some work alone. Everyone is tired. A student sleeps on a windowsill, a pillow under his head and a pile of clementines at his feet. Another tells me, his blue eyes not blinking, “I’ll sleep whenever I can’t stay awake anymore.”
Twelve hours, 360 Red Bulls, and over 800 cans of soda later, the attendees crowd an auditorium to watch the demos. Some sit on the floor and some wander in and out of the lobby, crushing more free sandwiches into their mouths and backpacks. The smell of BO floats through the back of the room. The boy next to me puts his head in his lap and naps through most of the presentations. He tells me he didn’t sleep last night. His team doesn’t win a single prize.
This is a snapshot of programming at Columbia, where, as in many universities across the country, computer science is booming and hackathons like the one described here are springing up with unprecedented speed. Here, the number of students projected to graduate with a degree in CS has risen 50 percent in the past two years. So has the number of students registered for the introductory class, W1004 (commonly referred to as “ten-oh-four”). On the national level, the Computing Research Association reported an “astonishing” 29.2 percent increase in new computing undergraduate majors.
CS and programming have more widespread appeal than ever before. Startups are frequently acquired for millions of dollars—and sometimes, as in the case of Instagram, for $1 billion. Starting salaries for graduates of top schools are commonly close to six figures. CS has gained cultural appeal through The Social Network, which grossed more than $220 million worldwide. “We’re treated more and more as if we possess superpowers,” explains Sam Aarons, a School of Engineering and Applied Science junior studying CS and the owner of Print@CU. “I can’t even be at a family gathering without somebody asking me if I have any ideas for companies I want to start or if I want to be the next under-25 billionaire.”
Yet the flash and money mask, as they so often do, the sadder stories of loss and failure. Ilya Zhitomirskiy was the co-founder of Diaspora, which once threatened Facebook’s stronghold over social media. Aaron Swartz was arguably one of the co-founders of Reddit and led the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Swartz was 26 when he killed himself. Zhitomirskiy was 22.
This past February, the Engineering student council released a newsletter containing a short paragraph saying that Tejraj Antooa, a computer science student who was not enrolled at the time, “perished on January 24, 2013 near his home in Elmont, Long Island.” The coroner’s office determined the cause of death was suicide. A flutter of Facebook activity expressed grief and anger, but after an aborted attempt to draft a letter criticizing the seemingly slow-acting administration, the formal conversation on campus ended. There was no memorial service. There was no space for discussion. (...)
What follows is by no means the experience of every undergraduate in the CS department. Not everybody is suffering. Not everybody is overlooked. Instead, these stories are meant to show the perspectives of the alienated or underrepresented who, if they are not merely silenced or told they are “wrong,” are placed on a shelf labeled “We’ll get to that later.”
by Kyla Cheung, The Eye (Columbia Daily Spectator) | Read more:
Image: Suze Meyers
