HackMerced X
Published:
HackMerced X Background by Marian Zuniga and Lauren Hur
I brought together the CSE community with my work as the Executive Director of the HackMerced hackathon.
To run 2 main events (workshop event, and main 36-hour hackathon), I interviewed and assembled 20+ like-minded organizers, 9+ judges, and 10+ mentors.
Most of HackMerced X Organizers + Alumni and more!
I led the logistics team, coordinating with the university to secure permits and rooms, and with MLH to officiate our event.
I also created pipelines to intake, process, and inform event registrants. I led the marketing team, running social media, email, flyer, tabling, and class presentation campaigns.
HackMerced X Mascot CyberPunk Raccoon by Megan Ciraulo 
HackMerced X Mascot DinoRacoon by Megan Ciraulo 
HackMerced X and STEM Tutoring Center Collaboration Sticker by Emi Rueth 
HackMerced X Sticker by Alisson Ross
To fund our hackathon, I led sponsorship negotiations with 10+ companies, securing $10,000.
I led the engineering team to develop a main website and an event management website in collaboration with Badger LLC.
HackMerced X powered by gobadger.me for Event Management! 
HackMerced X Live Event Management Website Made With Badger LLC by Megan
I hosted 27 workshops from internal organizers, collaborating clubs, sponsors, and guest speakers, including 6 workshops of my own.
My Workshops:
Some comments about my Pretraining A Language Model Workshop: Initially, I found machine learning daunting and questioned whether I could understand such a complex field. I decided to dive headfirst into Andrej Karpathy’s ML videos, expecting to grasp only surface concepts. I was surprised to follow along and complete the video, earning a solid understanding of pretraining a language model.
Inspired by this experience, I created a HackMerced workshop to help others overcome the intimidation of learning ML. I developed the 2 hour workshop using pedagogical methods I learned from 8+ years of teaching martial arts and tutoring CSE and Math students. I used scaffolding examples and analogies to help students connect the same dots I did. With 50+ students, we learned transformer architecture, implemented ML optimization techniques, and pretrained a language model wrapped in a Gradio web interface. The excitement of seeing their own language model generating text just like ChatGPT motivated students to continue learning ML, with some students asking me additional questions after class.
The event drew 180+ participants who generated 35+ projects. I documented the process and trained the next organizer cohort, building the foundation that allowed the next team to run an additional 10-hour hackathon, along with the main 36-hour hackathon.