Who are we?

HackNorthwestern (HackNU) is a student group at Northwestern University that revolves around empowering a community of student technologists to learn and create awesome things with technology. We are not a software security group, and when we say hacking we refer to tinkering with software and technology to quickly iterate and build things. We have existed as a student community at Northwestern now for 2 years. Events Our group holds several events regularly to promote this: Hack Nights: These are the bread and butter of our community at the moment. Hack Nights are weekly informal gatherings of students interested in software/programming, where we provide food and soda, and give people a space to collaborate and work on anything. Many incredible discussions on technical topics arise, and aside from some people just doing homework (which is fine with us), ourselves and our members have really benefitted from the weekly exposure to other similarly motivated students with which to collaborate on projects, or just get informal help with any homework or personal-project-related issues. Hackathons: About once a year, we organize an event ranging from 12-36 hours where students gather to work on projects and compete for prizes. Hack Courses: These are student-run workshops/lectures/etc on different technologies. They range greatly in topic and assumed expertise (examples include intro to the web and web development, and more advanced courses on Ruby on Rails and Node.js). Tech talks and other company-sponsored events: These can happen during hack nights, where companies send out an experienced developer or two to give a talk on some of the interesting technologies they use or challenges theyve solved. Also, we have had events such as a technical interviewing workshop with Google and are working to put on

a panel with multiple companies in data analytics about how to break into that field. There is plenty of room to get creative with these types of events. Membership Membership in HackNU has no requirements. If youre in our Google group or attend any of our events, you can consider yourself a member of the group. We have approximately sixty current members, with a core of 15-20 who come to virtually all of our events, and the rest who show up to events intermittently based on the event or free time on that night. We are, of course, always looking to further expand our reach into the CS community and beyond to create motivated interest in software and computer science and empower our members with further resources. Leadership HackNU has no formal leadership structure. Currently we are led by senior Ryan McAfee and sophomore Shikhar Mohan, who both split the roles of president and treasurer, because they split up the work involved in driving the vision of the group, taking care of administrative business, and managing group finances and reaching out to potential sponsors. We are in the process of onboarding another sophomore to take on administrative duties after Ryan graduates. Our philosophy is fairly minimalist on bureaucratic structure: we simply see ourselves as members and peers of our community, who happen to do the occasional dirty work so that we can all benefit. Thus, we are not authoritative towards our members and simply listen to what they want and try to serve them. This means we dont have any sort of elections but rather any member who is more involved and wants to further help is welcome to do so, and the more active our members are, the more bandwidth we have to take on more ambitious projects. Currently, having only two administrative members has never been inhibitive to our ability to execute on our vision.

Corporate Sponsorship/Partnership Opportunities: There are multiple ways in which companies can engage with HackNU, each with different benefits for the participating company and for the students. 1. Putting on tech talks at our hack nights. In this way, students get a chance to learn something interesting about software from professionals in an unobtrusive way, and companies get to send developers who, by nature of demonstrating their expertise through their talk, end up making a solid case for students as to why they should be interested in joining the company. Our expectations of companies who wish to partner with us in this way is that they sponsor the food for that hack night, and they keep their talk about something interesting and engaging to the students. It is acceptable to give a brief pitch about the company, but these are not meant to be company info sessions. In fact, these tend to be more useful to student developers as well as recruitment because they show off the types of things student hackers are interested in from a company, while still being useful to members who are not looking for jobs. Frequently, after giving the talk (anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half in length), the company representative will stick around to hack on stuff with students and discuss the company or its APIs with those interested. 2. More specialized events, such as corporate sponsorship of our hackathons, longer company-led workshops on a particular skill (such as technical interviewing), or panels. 3. Lastly, and most important to the longevity and health of HackNU as an organization, is monetary sponsorship for general use. This establishes a longer-term partnership between HackNU and the company, and helps us fund our continued operations such as food for hack nights, group merchandise, and hosting costs. In return for this type of sponsorship, HackNU places the sponsoring companys logo and link to their recruitment page on our website, sends out an introductory email to all our members describing the company and thanking them for their support (as well as pointing to recruiting materials), and brings up the general

awesomeness of the company at hack night thanking them for supporting our ability to exist. Additionally, we are looking to create a resume book of all our members and share this with our sponsors as well. One thing we must mention that we do NOT do is send out email blasts for recruiting or other such special interests for companies. Computer science students and software hackers are fortunate to have many job opportunities available, and as such our members have told us that they prefer to only get emails from us relating directly to events that we are putting on.