Students discuss goals for hackathons at New York’s HackCon on Friday. 

In a midtown Manhattan commercial space stuffed with a hundred or so students from universities across the nation, junior Brent Bovenzi felt right at home.

On Friday, he and eight other students from this university hopped on a bus bound for the Big Apple and HackCon, a two-day conference hosted by Major League Hacking, HackMIT and PennApps that aimed to get a feel for the future of hackathons and promote a sense of community among the schools represented.

For the students from this university, the conference also helped solidify their goals for their own upcoming hackathon, Bitcamp, said Bovenzi, an electrical engineering and government and politics major.

“Everyone was really down-to-earth,” he said. “It was actually really great to talk to them.”

Citing multiple hackathons that have brought in more than 1,000 participants in the past six months, Bovenzi said he came away from the conference optimistic about future possibilities. Just a year ago, the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn-

Apps boasted “the largest college hackathon in the world” with fewer than 500 people in attendance.

“I still like to imagine that if hackathons were around when Mark Zuckerberg were in college, he’d be going to them,” he said. “If you step back and think about it, the next big things made are probably going to be made by the people going to these.”

In the days after HackCon, Bovenzi said the Bitcamp organizers developed a better idea of how to use Bitcamp’s “fun, quirky feel” to their advantage.

That’s because the conference placed an emphasis on sharing experiences among the hackers, he said. Throughout Saturday and Sunday, students and recent alumni led most of the talks and discussions.

For example, representatives from PennApps, who accrued sponsorship from tech giants such as Microsoft and Facebook for their Feb. 14 to 16 event, talked about effective techniques used to raise money.

MacKenzie Burnett, a junior government and politics and international relations major, said the financial aspect of HackCon was particularly beneficial to her.

Doubling as the director of outreach for Startup Shell — the student-run entrepreneurship nonprofit of which Bovenzi is the student director — Burnett joined the Bitcamp organizing efforts when she saw an area that needed more organization: sponsorship.

It was almost an unintentional partnership, one in which she helped out once and then progressively became more immersed, she said. At HackCon, she gave a talk called “Bitcamp: Getting the University to help fundraise.”

“It’s a funny story how I got involved, but I’m really glad I did,” she said. “These are the future leaders of the world, and it’s good to get to know them now.”

Burnett has focused her efforts on sponsorship outreach for Bitcamp, she said. As of yesterday, the website listed eight sponsors, including companies such as AT&T and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.

There’s still a long way to go, she said, but her job has been made easier by the unexpected support from the university, which has offered to assist in fundraising for the event. The university also will allow the Bitcamp organizers to use Cole Field House for free.

“I’ve never heard of another university that is willing to help out a hackathon,” she said. “They get it. A lot of other schools don’t get it.”

But while the university has responded positively, the challenge has been to win over more sponsors. Large hackathons often run a bill to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, Burnett said.

Some prospective companies see the recruiting value in a hackathon, while others don’t, she added. So she breaks it down for them.

“With a resume, you can only see so much,” she said. “With a hackathon, you can actually see what they can do.”

Burnett said HackCon featured representatives from the type of companies that might be interested, which allowed her to understand a new perspective on what attracts a potential sponsor. It helps if the company already knows what a hackathon is, she added.

“If you’ve heard of it, you get it,” Burnett said.

MLH Commissioner Mike Swift said the weekend conference sold out of tickets before the event. MLH offered students a subsidized ticket that cost about $100 for two nights in one of the four lofts they rented.

“We’re super happy with the way the event went around,” he said. “There are some things we’ll change. But it was so successful, it’ll definitely happen again.”

Going into the weekend, participants raised questions as to how the culture would change moving forward into the age of multithousand-person college hackathons. Swift said he was surprised to find the main questions being asked were along the lines of, “How can we better work together?”

The real values of the collective group were still in learning, he said.

“It’s just the start of bigger and better things,” he said.