Ethan Bensman

Even though it was Ethan’s idea to switch his major from Physics to Computer Science, he couldn’t help but feel that he didn’t know what he was doing. He was a freshman in college with little knowledge of the possibilities of CS, scraping along with his classmates. After opening up to an upperclassman about his recent trouble, he was told about a few students that had just started a hackathon planning team. They called it CUhackit. Ethan wasn’t familiar with the idea of a hackathon, but joined the students anyway. Together, they spent six months planning into the late-night, messaging on Slack and bonding over the weeks of hangouts. Not only did these friends help Ethan become a leader and innovator, they helped him finally solidify a place in the world of coding.

After the stress of changing majors and struggling to find his footing, it’s important for Ethan to remind himself to just have fun. It’s easy to miss out on parties and hangouts that fly by when you’re caught up in work that you care about, but Ethan made a point to enjoy his work even more by taking risks for the sake of infusing some more enjoyment. He decided to go out on a limb during a recent hackathon with a more ‘out there’ idea. When he told a sponsor at the event about his idea, they responded: “How is that useful?” Ethan answered honestly. It wasn’t practical, but it was something that he enjoyed making.

This gave him confidence in his ability to find the simple happiness in the projects that he would work on in order to solve important problems. There was a time to work and be productive, but at this specific hackathon, he was free to have fun, and he doesn't regret taking the risk that he did.

After graduating from CUhackit events to hackathons that he had no part in planning, Ethan still found a way to bring the leadership skills that he learned from his friends into this new environment. He hadn’t yet helmed a project in a major way, but at Vandyhacks V, he was given that opportunity. Ethan’s project, Hip Empathy Friend, became his favorite because of the confidence in being a leader that it instilled in him.

The hackathon community at Clemson was small when Ethan joined as a freshman but he’s watched himself grow with it, which has been an incredibly rewarding experience. It was hard at first to not have a community laid out with perfectly-aligned interests, but this gave him time to learn about himself, his place in CS and what he wants to achieve. Upholding the importance of the diversity of technologies and perspectives is a major major issue that Ethan zeroed in on during his time at hackathons. Seeing so many different stories, projects and tools that people have used for the sake of changing the world gives Ethan the belief that the status quo doesn’t work well for everyone. In fact, he believes that the status quo exists to be broken in order to ensure that the world of tech doesn’t just reinforce the inequalities that we already have. The exposure to different perspectives at hackathons is the most valuable tool that Ethan hopes to bring into a career in software engineering.

He was then able to bring part of that new-found purpose and experience to CUhackit. In hopes of bridging the cultural divide, they’ve worked on an NSF-backed project to bring hackathons to Botswana, where their faculty advisor was on a Fulbright. The six-month planning period looked overwhelming at first, but Ethan was able to bring all that he had learned over the years in order to help the idea grow.

As an organizer, Ethan makes it his mission to bring the value of mentorship, the same way that his peers brought mentorship to him during his first go with CUhackit. Whether it’s giving practice interviews or larger cultural changes like hackathon strategy, he makes it his goal to pay it forward. That's what's made Hello World, a Clemson freshman-only hackathon he helped start in 2018, so special to him. Like him, a lot of students come into college without knowing much about computer science, and especially in some of the rural areas around Clemson, far less built-in support for learning and networking. Things like Hello World and the partnership he helped establish between CUhackit and the smaller colleges around upstate South Carolina are the way he thinks hackathons should always work--a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Ethan and his friends at CUhackit count themselves as lucky to be a part of a community that will always work towards uplifting voices that may not have had the opportunities to speak otherwise.