Tips from hackmerced II

• We worked with other schools to bring students to hackmerced, we found engaged students from other campuses, either through emails or an existing connection to help us recruit
• Always account for students with special diets, save a good 100$ of the budget to get special meals that could be as simple as stuff from the dining hall
• Provide free wet wipes so less stinky students!
• Private hire busses are not that expensive, and can bring over students who basically will be garunteed to make projects
• Open applications early, and let people in on a rolling basis
• Reach out to the other UCs, they're usually receptive in doing collaborations, especially if you can provide them with something in return (students, connections, etc)
• It's better to have two "speakers", or people who are doing the talking, the main speaker is usually the director who should speak at the opening and closing ceremony, the other one will do the middle block events
• Directors should sleep the second night unless they're absolutly sure they're gonna be functonal for the final day, even so, prepare a second person in charge, or director of operations to handle the final day, usually the busiest
• Let students every year build things from scratch, and start early as possible, people are hungry to build, and your main site should be actually ready way in advanced, what your dev teams do after are the live pages and other internal pages
  • We build a admission managemnet system and backend for our event
• Reach out to students from other majors, you can get more perspective and additional support in school organization funding, we some SSHA members in the hackmerced org
• Design is very important