Although retired, I'm trying to keep some skin in the game. An opportunity to do that came up back in mid march when my friend Aankit Patel reached out to me. I've known Aankit since he ran CSforAll for the NYC Department of Education but now he's the University Dean for Tech and Computer and Info Sciences at CUNY. Aankit told me he had some extra funds to run an event and asked if I wanted to organize and run a hackathon for CUNY students.

I said no.

Too many moving parts and not enough time to put one together from mid March to end of May. I also figured that students wouldn't have time or interest so close to or right after finals.

Instead, I pitched, well, Pitchfest.

I took a page from Cristina Dolan's book. Cristina created a College and High School tech event "Dream it. Code it. Win it." that ran for a couple of years around a decade ago. The idea was that student teams submitted programs that they had already written to the event. At DiCiWi, winners were announced ahead of time and the event was an awards ceremony where there was a guest speaker, some project videos were shown, awards were given and a reception followed.

Pitchfest borrowed the "enter a project you already wrote" part but the event itself was very different.

On the surface, teams and individuals submitted projects that they had already completed - from a hackathon, a course like a capstone, or just a personal project. At Pitchfest, accepted groups were set up at different tables and over a series of rounds, showed off their work to tech professionals who then provided feedback.

To be honest, the actual pitches and project specific feedback was secondary. The real intent of the evening was to get the CUNY students talking with both a bunch of tech professionals as well as each other. To, yes, get feedback, but also inspiration and general guidance and to build their network. As one of our tech volunteers said, the goal wasn't really to improve and build the projects but rather to improve and build the participants.

Of course, in order to make this all happen, I had to come up with sufficient tech professionals so that each project would have at least one pro with them for each round. Since we had 45 participants split into 18 teams, it meant I needed at least 18 tech pros circulating.

Fortunately, and this is something I'm always appreciative of, my former students - my StuyCS family and my Hunter Daedalus family came through as usual and big time. We had around 25 volunteers plus a bunch more who said they could come if needed but had tight schedules.

We had a great range - recent grads to people with over ten and even over 20 years of experience. Software engineers, product managers, entrepreneurs, investors, people at small startups and people at tech giants. It was a terrific mix.

It's also worth noting that there was an extra benefit to having both my Hunter College students as some of the volunteers as well as a few of my StuyCS volunteers who had also attended a CUNY college - those students were all living proof that you can do amazingly well coming from New York's public schools and a few of my volunteers noted that they felt that their being CUNY products made an even bigger positive impact on the participants.

The evening went great - we had four rounds at the tables followed by three short demos and then open mixing and networking.

I'm just starting to get feedback from the professionals and the participants but initial reports are extremely positive. The participants got a lot out of the event and made new connections. One of my former students just sent me an email to tell me that they invited a couple of the participating teams to their offices to meet with their engineering teams.

Overall I think the event was a big win.

The thing that's sticking with me now the next day is my former student's comment about building the participants not the projects. This event was promoted as being about the projects but it was really about networking, building relationships, interacting with people in the tech community and in fact learning that you belong in that community. It's something I've long focused on when I set up programs and events.

We ran this one because Aankit had some extra funds. To do it again and moving forward we're going to have to find some company willing to sponsor. Hopefully that won't be too big of a challenge or ask.