For 24 hours starting Nov. 8, UTD’s engineering buildings transformed into a storybook wonderland for North America’s largest 24-hour hackathon, a title HackUTD now holds for the second year in a row. That weekend, it became a temporary city for 1,204 participants, opening the doors to two worlds operating in tandem: an immersive dream world made for participants, with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of prizes at stake, and the frenetic, student-led plan that allows this logistical feat to happen annually since 2015.
I spent the weekend passing through both worlds.
The storybook stakes
The participants’ journey began at 8 a.m. as hundreds of students waited to check-in and begin exploring the interactive narrative of this year’s hackathon. This year’s theme, “lost in the pages,” was a full story arc. Hackers weren’t just attendees; they were characters in a live tale that opened with a hand-drawn animated quest and closed with a skit resolving the plot.
“They made it a very immersive theme,” computer science junior and participant Swarna Sre Ganesh said. “From the moment I checked in, I was already surrounded by the many decorations and cute characters.”
The students I spoke to each came to the hackathon for their own reasons. The vast majority wanted to network with sponsors for the chance at a job after graduation, others were here to win the eye-catching prizes and some attended for the “vibes” and the famously free and high-quality merch.
“CS students want to actually do something for once at HackUTD,” Ganesh said. “The hackathon makes you get things done.”
Watching over the whole student sandbox were the sponsors — from PNC Bank to NVIDIA and T-Mobile — who make the prizes, endless energy drinks and merch possible. The opening keynotes mixed mentorship and advice with recruitment.
“You are only constrained by your imagination,” PNC Bank retail architecture and innovation head Geeta Mahesh said. “During this weekend you will help define new frontiers of the AI revolution.”
For these companies, HackUTD is a high-stakes talent lab where winners and innovative projects are up for grabs.
“Students solve problems in really unique ways,” NVIDIA data scientist Shashank Verma said. “They have not been institutionalized by the enterprise yet. I love seeing what everyone comes up with at hackathons.”
The engine behind the scenes
The dream world did not build itself, even if it seemingly appeared overnight. Its architects are co-directors Adelaide Dunning, an education senior, and Kelly Zhou, a computer science senior, as well as their team of 37 volunteer officers. Their work is a year-round cycle of planning that starts “as soon as the last Hackathon ends,” Zhou said.
The team manages everything from HackUTD’s judging tech — which was hacked last year, now secured — to the ratio of halal and vegan meals. Their philosophy is focused on cooperation.
“We hate lecture-style meetings,” Dunning said. “We always aim for open discussion and try to go out on group outings when we can.”
They also focus on being friends (or at the minimum friendly) first and officers second. Experience officer and master of ceremonies Reiki Hingorani said that HackUTD and its officer team were incredibly welcoming.
“Apply, take the risk,” Hingorani said. “We’re here for everyone.”
The scale they manage is staggering. The team put the budget, funded almost entirely by sponsors, toward a pop-up “tavern” that served mocktails by afternoon and ramen at midnight. They organized crates of donations, with Monster Energy alone donating over 2,300 energy drinks for the weekend — less than 100 were left by the end. Their success is measured in how invisible they can be and whether they can make this 24-hour competition feel seamless for the thousand-plus participants and dozens of volunteer judges and sponsors.
“It’s challenging to find the balance between giving our all to the hackers and prioritizing ourselves,” Hingorani said, voicing the quiet strain felt by all the organizers as they dealt with the fires, literal and metaphorical, that kept popping up. Dunning said that this year, the team’s biggest challenge was the fire alarm during the opening ceremony.
As students prepared to begin their 24-hour rush, a fire alarm in the ATEC building led to an hour-long delay for the entire event and last-minute rescheduling to keep everything, including meals, on time.
“Outside of finding a time to sleep, we also struggled with some technical difficulties during our ceremonies,” Zhou said. “But with events like this that are out of our control, we learn, we plan and we prepare so that it hopefully doesn’t happen next year.”
The challenge of judging at scale
Caption: Hackers wait in a judging room as judges move between groups. | Photo by GOG EIC
The judging process is where the tension of the hackathon reaches a fever pitch, as the dream of individual recognition smashes into the sheer scale of the event.
The competition numbers speak for themselves: 369 projects were submitted and about 300 were demoed. Judges from each sponsor and general prize track at the event had just three hours to review everything and finalize each decision.
T-Mobile judges said their biggest challenge was handling “tiebreaks and fights” over the 53 submissions they received from students eager to earn a free iPhone 17. At over 100 submissions, the NVIDIA track was the most competitive this year as students competed for three RTX 5080 GPUs, valued at around $1,400 each. Mahesh said that her team “used every single second we had.”
From the participants’ side, the speed at which everything had to be judged felt reductive. Ganesh said that while her team focused on building a data visualization project, none of the actual code or systems that made it work could be effectively reviewed in the two minutes each judge spent per team.
“They look at the outer part and judge it solely based on the cover of the book,” Ganesh said.
Ganesh said that without a way to delve deeper into each project, this structure would almost always lead to flashy user interfaces winning. Deep logic takes a back foot when judges don’t have time to read through hundreds or thousands of lines of code for each projects. While the judging software wasn’t hacked this year, participants complained about the strain the judging format, a necessity of the time frame, had on their evaluation.
The other reward of a hackathon
With over 1,200 hackers and less than 40 rewards, not everyone walked away from the hackathon as a winner. While judging may be a buzzsaw grinding against everyone involved with the hackathon, the rest of the event is where people prosper. The community and human connection that forms as hackers stay up for 24 hours in glass buildings surrounded by pizza boxes and Monster Energy cans is the true output of the event.
“I just fell in love with the people,” Dunning said. “I had to keep coming back every year after I started as a freshman.”
The sponsors, for all their corporate power, are chasing that same human element. When asked about memorable projects, the NVIDIA team didn’t cite a complex AI model. They spoke about a mother building a storybook generator for her child and a mechanic who coded an app to streamline his auto shop.
“The ingenuity of it was that even after the hackathon, this app solved a really annoying problem for this guy, you just love to see that passion and relief,” NVIDIA deep learning developer Chris Alexiuk said. “These stories are the perfect application born from personal need that validate why we invest in events like this.”
The blueprint for the future
The closing ceremony of HackUTD, like any hackathon, was a ritual of exhaustion. While showers are advertised as an amenity, not everyone made use of them. Students were testing the limits of their ability to stay awake and aware of their surroundings and the organizers made their final push to make the event a positive memory for every hacker. Winners were announced. The “Toyotron” team, which said it was inspired by last year’s winner “TalkTuahBank,” won NVIDIA’s top GPUs; the “Working Memory” team won the general track grand prize of a MacBook Air. The full list of projects, prizes and winners can be found on the HackUTD 2025 Devpost page.
As the final prizes were handed out, the temporary city dissolved. The tavern was dismantled, its barrel, drinks and remaining ramen stored away. The leftover energy drinks were packed up and wheeled away, presumably to be used during finals season.
What remains are the plans and blueprints students created for 369 new, mostly functioning projects; blueprints for connections; blueprints for HackUTD next year; and blueprints for a career from professionals currently going through the chaos of the technology job market.
For those interested in future hackathons, the NVIDIA team broke down what they as a sponsor think makes projects stand out. Senior product marketing manager Ethan Einhorn said to focus on communication and explaining complex ideas simply, because soft skills are the biggest part of the job. Verma said to specialize in a company’s tech stack before you compete and possibly even apply to demonstrate your research skills and passion.
“Make it clear that you are passionate and this project isn’t just entry 17 out of 38 on your resume,” Alexiuk said.
HackUTD’s now ten-year legacy is built on a layered reality in which hackers, organizers, judges and sponsors all work together to build one of the largest stages for student creative output. The student architects built one of the most intricate HackUTD themes to date, and sponsors sought out projects that could change lives and industries. And the hackers rose to the occasion set up for them with an endless sea of chaotic projects.
The foundation is already laid for the hackathon’s next iteration in 2026.
