High
Tech
Hacks
is a virtual hackathon, hosted by High Tech's leading STEM-focused club, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, that seeks to bring together a diverse group of high school talent to invent, create, and push the boundaries of technology. By providing opportunities to explore the world of computer science and engineering to underrepresented groups, High Tech Hacks seeks to bridge the representation gap in the tech industry.
Hackathon Schedule
9:00 AM
10:00 AM
11:00 AM
12:00 PM
1:00 PM
2:00 PM
Opening Ceremonies | Team Formation
Hacking Begins
Galicia Gordon: Networking 101
Shawn Wang: Leaving Finance for Coding
Tenay Barker: Float Like a Butterfly, Code
Simon Schwartz: Founding Locasaur
Day 1
All Times in EDT
Learn how to network from someone who grew a brand from the ground up! Galicia is the Founder of Leading Learners, an educational technology company. Galicia started the company to create an all-in-one academic software. Hundreds of thousands of users trust Leading Learners worldwide on its academic software solution, including tens of thousands of students, parents, counselors, and educators every month from globally renowned top-tier institutions such as Harvard, McGill, Oxford, UBC, Peking, IIT Madras, every Ivy League, every UC, and hundreds of other institutes, departments, families, and teams worldwide.
After a successful career in finance, Shawn Wang needed a change of pace. Taking a leap of faith, he decided to quit his $350k a year job and find a new path. Shawn wisely spent his time using FreeCodeCamp and other resources to learn how to code. Since then, Shawn has worked as a freelance developer and at several companies including Netlify, Amazon Web Services, Temporal, and now AirByte. Hear about his journey through finance and into coding in this event and have a chance to ask your own questions!
Fujia Ren & Rahul Devarapalli: AWS and
Join this workshop via the Chime link in our Discord!
3:00 PM
This workshop will go through my journey from a Computer Science student to a Site Reliability Engineer for Microsoft. I will talk about the moments that helped mold me into the Engineer that I am today. There will be lessons that I have learned and the battles I have endured with imposter syndrome, workplace environment, mentorship, and networking.
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Tenay "10A" Barker is a Site Reliability Engineer for Microsoft and a champion of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the Technology and Defense sectors. Tenay is a part of the GEAR-CAP team at Microsoft that works with the Federal government to support and monitor Microsoft applications and data in classified environments. Prior to joining Microsoft, Tenay worked for Raytheon Intelligence & Space, where they held roles inside and outside technical engineering and worked as a Software Engineer on the infrastructure team for a legacy program. Tenay is an out-and-proud lesbian and an active volunteer, voice, and leader in the LGBTQ+ community. Tenay has served as a Board Member for two LGBTQ-related non-profits in Dallas, Texas, and held the Regional Vice President position for the Raytheon LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group
5:00 PM
Games with Major League Hacking!
6:00 PM
Tenay Barker: The {Agile} Method to the
This workshop will teach students what an Agile Methodology is, through the SCRUM product development lifecycle from a Certified SCRUM Developer. This will be a technical talk to help students understand one of the more popular methodology s being used in the Tech industry today. This talk will go over the roles, rules, and responsibilities for everyone in a SCRUM team.
7:00 PM
8:00 PM
Veer Chauhan: Entrepreneurship for Students
What's a startup? What's venture capital? What really is entrepreneurship?
If you've ever had these questions or wonder what the answers might be, join Veer Chauhan to learn more about how to get involved in the startup ecosystem in college! We'll discuss how to use university resources to work with startups, get support for your own ideas, and why working or building a startup is an excellent fit for any creative, persistent problem solver.
Christien Williams: Pathways into Engineering,
Product Management, and Entrepreneurship
Christien Williams is an Associate Product Manager at Schmidt Futures.
Previously, Christien interned at Facebook as a software engineer building computer vision infrastructure on the video integrity team; Polimorphic, as a machine learning engineer building models to classify and label articles; and Gorelick Brothers Capital, as a business technology analyst. He studied as an ML researcher at École Normale Supérieur Paris-Saclay, in Paris, France, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. His work on Fast Accurate Supervised Cloud Annotation was published by IGARSS. He was also a teaching fellow for The Art and Science of Negotiation at MIT, working with Professor Bruno Verdini to design and teach course curriculum.
Christien holds a B.S. and M.Eng in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Simon Schwartz is the founder of Locasaur, a direct messaging app for local independent businesses that allows them to engage with regular customers and do business more personally. Locasaur’s mission is to empower local merchants with powerful, intuitive tools and build an unapologetically pro-local ally for them in tech.
At Columbia University, Schwartz was president of the Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs (CORE), helped co-found Columbia’s Almaworks Tech Accelerator and led economic and environmental initiatives at The Roosevelt Institute. He graduated with a major in philosophy and a concentration in archaeology.
9:00 PM
Continue Hacking!
Gabriel Lobl: Creating Bubbl
4:00 PM
Gabriel is the founder of Bubbl, a new kind of social app for creating hyper-casual plans with friends. He went to Georgia Tech to study CS, but he's been creating apps, games and websites from his bedroom since he was 15. Gabriel had experiences interning at a startup, an incubator, at Slack, and as the founding engineer of a small team at Rangr. One day, after brainstorming over different ideas for social networks and event planning, he and his friend Santi had the realization that led them to start Bubbl.
In this casual chat, Gabriel is going to talk about their journey building, raising money for, and building a team for Bubbl. He's going to share lessons he's learned, as well as the advice he'd give a younger version of himself.
Like a Bee
Madness
Day 2
Hacking Ends | Projects Submitted
9:30 AM
9:31 AM
Excited Waiting!
10:45 AM
Final Winners Announced
Closing Remarks
10:50 AM
Everybody loves games! Join the Zoom call in our Discord to paint along with Bob Ross and your fellow hackers.
The Cloud
Guests

Veer
Chauhan
Computer Engineering,
Columbia University
Speaker
Christien
Williams
Associate Product Manager,
Schmidt Futures
Fujia
Ren
Software Engineer,
Amazon
Speaker
Speaker
Galicia
Gordon
Founder,
Leading Learners
Speaker
Santiago
Pozuelo
Co-Founder,
Bubbl
Judge

Rahul
Devarapalli
Software Engineer,
Amazon
Speaker
Gabriel
Lobl
Co-Founder,
Bubbl
Gaurav
Sethi
Software Engineer,
Amazon
Speaker/Judge
Mentor
