Hack the North Admissions: What Happens After I Submit?
Written by: Jasmine J. and Joseph W.
With the 2024 application season right around the corner, we’re sure many of you are wondering how our application process works. This year, our team strives to be more transparent with our application process. As such, read on for a peek at our side of the process after you’ve hit “submit” on your application! 👀
To preface, we don’t want candidates to cater their application based on what would score higher in our system. Balancing fairness with transparency is difficult — we want this blog post to shed some light on our historically opaque process, but also want you to submit a unique application based on who you are!
What We’re Looking For
While we can’t reveal exactly what we’re looking for or how we score our 2024 applications, here are some bigger traits that the team looks for, in no particular order:
Love for Building
We look for hackers who demonstrate a love for building and take initiative to pursue that love. What you build doesn’t need to be tech-based or practical — we just love seeing creators at our event. After all, the core mission behind Hack the North is to enable attendees to “dream big and build”.
Community-Oriented
Community is a major aspect of Hack the North, and we seek candidates who would be a great addition to our community — whether you’ve actively participated in a community before or you think you possess strong traits that are compatible with a great community, we want to read about it in your application! A hackathon is not only a place to learn and build, but also a place to meet like-minded folks.
Driven by Passion
We value hackers who are passionate about learning, creating, and our event, and who demonstrate this passion in everything they do! An event can only be as great as its attendees, and we love seeing passionate hackers taking full advantage of our resources, collaborating with other hackers, and putting their all into their projects. Even if it’s not tech related, don’t be afraid to show off something that’s interesting or unique to you!
Technical Skills (or Initiative for Growth)
While not as important as the previous values, we appreciate hackers who have demonstrated the skill or the drive to learn, in order to be able to utilize all our resources to its fullest. This doesn’t mean you need to be extremely experienced — even a simple learning project or webpage will suffice. If you’re a complete beginner, this means showing you have the motivation and discipline to learn!
Our Process
Hack the North spends a lot of time trying to make the application process as fair and bias-free as possible — here’s a brief overview of how the process works.
Rubric System
We use a rubric and a score-based system for every question to help reduce individual biases and provide an objective guide to assess applications. We make this rubric by looking at the goals for each question and brainstorming what a bad, good, and excellent answer might look like. We then assign a scoring range (e.g from 0 to 5), and a question weight. Using this scoring system allows us to examine an answer with a more granular lens while letting us tweak the importance of questions. We also assess an applicant’s technical experience by using evidence shown in long answer responses and links to external sites like (but not limited to) Github, Devpost, Google Drive links, and personal portfolios.
Reviewing Tool
Every application is carefully assessed by human reviewers. We use a custom-built application-reviewing dashboard so that every application is reviewed as fairly as we can. In this dashboard, we censor all personal information (e.g. name, school, age, etc.) to reduce unconscious bias. We even built a custom Chrome extension to censor personal information like names or photos from common external links like LinkedIn!
If a team member needs personal information to determine eligibility (e.g. to determine if someone is younger than 13 or is not a student), they can request to view it with a valid reason. These requests are logged and monitored to prevent misuse. Additionally, these applications are randomly assigned to prevent team members from giving preferential treatment to certain applicants. Fairness is a huge part of our application review process — we run extensive bias and application review training for all organizers, and provide a “skip” button in case organizers cannot objectively review an application.
All 46 members of our active team contribute to application reviews over a 3 week period — reviewing thousands of applications. The only exceptions are our marketing team and travel organizer who handle your inquiries through our emails and social media pages.
Reducing Bias
While we recognize that bias is a key risk in any system, especially given the high volume of applications to review (for some insight, we had over 7000 incredible submissions last year!), we take the following steps to ensure we act as fair as possible:
- Host an application review bootcamp where senior team members go through sample applications to standardize scoring.
- Run bias training to help organizers recognize common biases and detect when they are subconsciously applying bias against an applicant.
- Continuously stress the importance of recognizing one’s biases, avoiding reviewing people you know, and looking for opportunities to improve our processes.
- Log and audit any personal information requests used to check eligibility that could introduce bias in scoring.
- Employ a normalization script that inflates or deflates a team member’s score based on the team-wide average (to reduce variation from strictness between organizers).
Demographic Information
Finally, to address the big question floating around:
“Does my demographic information affect my application score?”
Nope! As mentioned on the application, all demographic information is not considered when we review applications — we don’t adjust scores based on age, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sex, etc. Demographic information is only used to understand the general trends of our hackers, so that we can better tailor initiatives or revise parts of the hackathon. In fact, demographic information isn’t even shown in our app review tool, and we take effort to hide personal details when possible. Every hacker is picked based on their merit and how much we think they’ll benefit from our event.
We hope this has given you a better understanding of how we run applications — we’re doing our best to listen to feedback, and we appreciate your understanding as we keep trying new ideas. After all, Hack the North is for students, by students, and we want to keep empowering as many students as possible to dream big in tech. Keep building, and we hope to see you this September!
— Team Hack the North 💙⚙️
Special thanks to Annette L., Arpita S., Agamjot S., and Catherine Y. for proofreading and editing this post!
