My Smart India Hackathon Journey.
By: Muskan Gupta
Tags: Hacks, Tips, Smart India Hackathon, Hackathons, Coding

Part — I

One of the few things which I have loved so solely was Smart India Hackathon . I had felt a different level of connection with this hackathon from the beginning and was ready to put whatever it would take me to win it. So this blog is all about a deep dive into that wonderful journey.

December 2019 , I was looking onto problem statements , messaging some of my friends asking if they would like to form a team , I had not worked on any project before neither had i any specific skills but I had this belief that i would be able to it. 2019 was the first year when someone was participating from our college in SIH so we didn’t have any mentorship and I was just trying to connect to some people who could guide me with their experiences.

Team Formation

Till the end of December we had formed a team and were looking onto the Android domain to select a suitable problem statement. We were really disconfident that we would end up choosing any unsuitable problem statement due to lack of confidence and another major reason was that none of us were good at any skill who could take an analysed decision about what problem statement to choose but we were taking our time and the processs was going on.

07th January 2020 , We had some Conflict in our team got splitted into two parts and I felt disheartened about time passing on and I didn’t even had my team ready. I felt my dream shattering , I thought about all this whole night and next day I started calling some friends of my college whom i wanted to take in my team(Most of my friends were home that time , some holiday was going on). I called them told about my plan and asked if they were interested and finally in next two days I had my team(Muskan,Suman,Nargis,Bhaskar, Ansh,Afzal) ready for Smart India Hackathon.

Choosing the Problem Statement

As I mentioned , We were being really confused about choosing our problem statement so One night I sat down with one of my friends(who also lives in my hostel)to go through all problem statements out there and choose the most suitables out of them.At around 1 pm we were able to pick some good Problems , We called one other teammate and put him on speaker and till around 4 in the morning I had made a doc of 16 problem statements and he had made a doc of 33 problem statements out of which we had to choose the most perfect one for us. Next day we choose three of them and discussed with the whole team and we finalised the problem statement “Develop a Student Grievance Redressal system for Government of Andhra Pradesh under Web App Domain”.

PPT Submission

We now had almost one month left for preparing PPT and submitting it. This is the deciding factor in Smart India Hackathon. The amount of effort in right direction you put in this phase decided whether you are being proceeded or not.

Steps:

After deciding the problem statement , the first step was to surf all the information we could find about grievance redressal system related to all domains , all regions. Knowing how they work? what’s the loophole? where could they improve? what can we add in this?How can we make it better? and so and so. This step made us more informative about the problem we were going to solve.

2. After the research we had to plan what we were going to build , how will we build it , what will be the flow , who will work on what(Although no-one had any specific skill-set ;)

3. We had got a format of the PPT we had to submit it was a 3 slide PPT — First slide mentioning details like about team leader , college excetra. Second slide about the solution and tech-stack and third slide was going to be the Flow diagram of our proposed solution + Dependencies if we had any.

4. So after all the research , surfing , discussions we finally worked on preparing ppt in various various rounds(around 10 final versions were updated😁)we finally finalised our ppt 2 days before the submission deadline just to be on the safer side. I will link down the ppt we had prepared so that you can get a reference of how you have to work on your ppt.

5. You can refer to our PPT over here 👇

So the PPT got submitted and we started focussing on our skills as it was one month since our results for selection in Grand finale were going to be out but we were always having our fingers crossed for the results as that one announcement was going to make it or break it atleast at that moment it was that much important taking into account the amount of time , efforts and labour we had put into it crossing all the barriers but still we had not any option rather than waiting. From the end of February the results started getting published in various batches and every time a batch result was announced the amount of heartbeat we were experiencing just can’t be experienced in words and at the end of the teams list we used to take a big sigh of relief not because we won but knowing that our result was not announced yet and we still had hope. And on 06th March 2020 at around 9 pm I got a phone call from my brother and he said “Muskan , Tera team grand finale m select ho gya”(Muskan , your team got selected in grand finale) and you can’t even believe what these words meant to me .

I was at a friends place on this day and i just wanted to go on roof and yell as loudest as i can but couldn’t do that (because with my friend was her family also 😂) but nevertheless i was definetely feeling on ninth cloud . I called all of my teammates , asked all of them to cross check again if was not dreaming this and that was the night I couldn’t sleep due to happinesss for the first time in my life. This was the first time in the history of college that any team had qualified to Smart India Hackathon(or a natiobal level hackathon). The whole college was in joy we(Team — SAMBAN) were receiving tons and tons of wishes and joys from studnets , faculties , seniors and everyone outthere . That was a totally different feeling.

And now the actual grind was yet to start. from taking the problem from scratch to learning all the skills required in it and taking it to the final product which I wanted to talk about here only but this blog has already become lengthy so I will attach a part-II soon wherein I will mention the whole process onwards.

Till then keep coding :)

if you have further queries here is my linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/muskancodes/