UC Berkeley is generally known more for academia than practical application, especially when it comes to computer science. However, the student organizations on campus have begun to provide an environment for campus programmers to come together and participate in hackathons. While these all-day programming fests may not seem like anything special, hackathons act as a motivation for students to block out a chunk of time away from their busy class schedules, homework and meetings, so they can focus on their projects.

Products that come out of these intensive programming sessions are often unfinished or still in its developing stages due to time constraints for each hackathon. Regardless, students may decide to take the projects that they started at a hackathon and continue to polish it into a complete, launchable product like UC Berkeley’s student class schedule app, ScheduleBuilder, which began as NinjaCourses.

Hackathons are often sponsored and sometimes hosted by tech companies or venture capitalists, which means that they also give way for computer science students to make the best out of their talents and luck to find a shortcut into the tech industry.

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