As a college student majoring in Computer Science, I have been attending hackathons since my first year in college. For me, hackathons have been a way for me to show case what I have learned in school into an actual product that I can show off to someone who works in the tech industry that can actually land me a job at their company.
Hackathons are easy ways to have that bloated resume full of projects. What tech recuriters and engineers are looking for are people who can demonstrate that they can build stuff when they get into industry. With hackathon projects on your resume, it help convince the person that is looking at your resume that you can build products. In the long run, companies only care if you can build products.
You will learn a lot of new technology by attending hackathons. Every hackathon, there are some awesome prizes for using certain company’s APIs. This will teach you how to learn how to incorporate new languages which can give you a wider set of skills to put on your resume.
Hackathon is where ideas come to life and there is no better place to do it than at a hackathon since you can get as much help as you need in order to complete your project at the end of the event. At the end when you demo your hack, you can get a feel of how people from the industry feel about your product. For some people, this is a good indicator whether the product is going to work in the marketplace
So keep on hacking