Event Organization
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Event Organization •
Helping to design Bitcamp’s 10th year anniversary hackathon for 100+ organizers and 1300+ participants.
Role
Duration
Team
Design Director
June 2023 - May 2024
Eunice Oh, Mia Hsu, Mika Pendem, Anning Cui, Vivian Howe, Zoie Luka, Devika Elakara, Caitlin Yan, Trisha Anand
What’s Bitcamp?
A place for exploration
Bitcamp is the University of Maryland's premier hackathon, bringing together over 1,400 students, making it the largest collegiate hackathon on the East Coast.
The hackathon is hosted annually at the University of Maryland, and is a weekend jam-packed with swag, workshops, networking, and amazing projects by student developers, designers, builders, and thinkers from around the country.
The 2024 season celebrated our 10th year anniversary!
How Might we
design our hackathon to celebrate our 10th year anniversary?
As the Design Director for the 2024 season, I managed a team of 8 designers from varying backgrounds who helped create the 10th year anniversary theme: All About the Journey!
Each week, I led team meetings where we delegated tasks, planned bonding events, and worked together on the week’s deliverables, all while having fun along the way.
A first for everything
Leading the 2o24 design team
The thinking behind the theme
initial ideation
Finalizing the theme in the Fall semester was one of the first steps in getting things started, so the design team created theme presentations to present within the first few weeks of starting the season.
These themes were brainstormed amongst all of the organizers through a theme Slack channel. The design team then narrowed it down to our three contenders: the legend of Bitcamp, Bitcamp’s birthday party, and throwback retro.
After presenting our themes during the 3rd general body meeting, all of the organizers were able to vote for their favorite theme through a voting system in Slack.
Then through collaboration with marketing, experience, tech, and events, the team worked on a range of designs that would be used for swag, Bitcamp-hosted events, social media, and the website.
Designs received feedback from not only within the design team but the entire organizing team itself.
So what does it all mean?
Celebrating bitcamp’s growth
When we think about throwback retro, we thought about all the past seasons right to 2014 when the founding organizers created Bitcamp. We thought “Wow. It’s really been such a journey.” Hence, “All About the Journey” was born.
It’s a tagline to not only celebrate our 10th anniversary but to also reflect all the work that came before us, and how past organizers and participants worked tirelessly to grow Bitcamp to what it is today.
We think of the past and explore to the future!
Pre & Post Recruitment work
What did I work on as design director?
Prior to creating the team, I was the sole designer from June to October 2023.
And even with the team, I didn’t want to be just a leader but also be a designer with them. Below are some of the work I did!
Meet the 2024 Directors social post
For the first time ever, I created a Meet the Directors social post to open the upcoming season.
It’s been one of our highest liked posts yet, and it’s started to become a repeated implemented design by our next design director!
Social media posts
Flyers
post-season reflection
Being a leader is tough but fruitful
This was the first time I took on a role of leading a group of designers to handle such a large scale event. There were challenges and obstacles but all of our hard work made everything worth it.
I learned the importance of taking a step back, actively listening to others, and fostering a supportive environment where people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and concerns (and to have fun creating!).