Highlights from HackMIT 2026! - Keynote by Grant Sanderson - 1000 hackers, 175 mentor/judges, 140 sponsor reps checked in - 11 Hack Week sessions, 5 workshops, 2 tech talks, 3 fireside chats, and 9 mini-events - Robot dogs, coffee carts, live serenades, laser tag - $100k in prizes given out - 300 projects in 24 hours Thank you to everyone who spent the weekend bringing incredible ideas to life. Here are some highlights from an unforgettable weekend!

Grant Sanderson's keynote speech at HackMIT 2026. "We no longer need to understand to build." "Are you learning in order to build?" "Or are you building in order to learn."

Announcing our Bronze sponsor challenges. Warp: Best Developer Tool 🏆 Prizes 🥇 1st place: Keychron mechanical keyboard for each team member OpenAI: OpenAI Challenge 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: One year of ChatGPT Pro + OpenAI backpack + OpenAI swag bundle 🥈2nd place: Six months of ChatGPT Pro 🥉3rd place: Three months of ChatGPT Pro Regeneron: Make Clinical Trials and Biostatistics Better! 🏆 Prizes: TBD

Announcing our Silver sponsor challenges. Espressif: Best Use of Espressif Hardware & Solutions 🏆 Prizes 🥇 1st place: 1× AI Pyramid Computing Box Pro 8GB (AX8850) + 4× S31 Korvo Boards ElevenLabs Challenge 🏆 Prizes: TBD Meta: Bringing People Closer Together with AI 🏆 Top 3 teams receive: - Invitation to Round 2 at Meta’s Menlo Park campus, with travel and accommodations provided - Meta swag bag Arrowstreet Capital: Best Textual Analysis Hack 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $1,000 distributed among the team + interview with a Research team member for each winner + hoodie for each team member Deepgram: Build Something Worth Talking To 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: 1 Nintendo Switch for each member of the winning team

Announcing our Gold sponsor challenges. Dimensional: Best Use of Dimensional 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: Unitree Go2 per team + interview opportunity for internship or full-time 🥈2nd place: $500 cash per team + interview opportunity for internship or full-time Elastic: Find the Signal 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: Meta Quest 3S Headphones per team member 🥈2nd place: Bose QuietComfort Headphones per team member GiveCampus: Find the Hidden Dollars 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: Private lunch or dinner + $500 team donation to an education nonprofit + feature spotlight on GiveCampus LinkedIn or blog 🥈2nd place: 60-minute mentorship session 🌱 Best Beginner / Early Builder: Headphones or gift cards + 30-minute resume review Cursor: Make it Legendary with SpaceXAI 🏆 Prizes: TBD Dropbox: Turn Digital Chaos into Something Useful 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: AirPods Max 2 + fast-track interview process for a Dropbox internship 🥈2nd place: JBL PartyBox Encore Essential 2 Speaker + fast-track interview process for a Dropbox internship Ramp: Save Time. Save Money. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: Nintendo Switch + Oura Ring + $100 per member 🥈2nd place: Nintendo Switch + sweatpants + $100 per member 🥉3rd place: Ramp swag (hoodie, sweatpants, Owala, frisbee) + $100 per member

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Cognition challenge. Best Use of Devin 🤖 Use Devin, the AI software engineer, to build something exciting. Ambitious ideas welcome: Devin plans, writes, tests, and ships the code alongside you, so aim bigger than a weekend normally allows. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $5,000

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Visa challenge. Reimagine Shopping Use Generative AI to craft smarter, effortless commerce experiences. 🛍️ Shopping is evolving from searching and browsing to conversing and collaborating with AI. Consumers expect AI-powered experiences that help them discover products, compare options, personalize recommendations, manage budgets, and complete purchases seamlessly. 💳 Your challenge is to design and build a commerce experience powered by Generative AI that makes shopping more intuitive, personalized, and frictionless while enabling secure and trusted payments. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $5,000

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Arduino challenge. Touch Grass: Build Something That Understands the Real World The most revolutionary software in the world is useless if it can’t feel the world. Code lives in the abstract. Light, temperature, sound, pressure, motion, humidity, that’s reality. Software has conquered the digital world. Now it’s time to build systems that understand the physical one. This challenge asks you to build the bridge between them. Using the Arduino® UNO™ Q, you’ll pull raw, messy, beautiful data from the physical environment around you and turn it into something that matters: a tool that helps someone, an experience that surprises someone, a system that understands the world a little better than it did before. The best projects won’t just visualize sensor data, they’ll transform it into meaningful, intelligent experiences. 🏆 Prizes: TBD

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Voloridge challenge. Signal in the Noise Build something interesting using one or more real-world public datasets. We’ll provide a curated selection of large, publicly available datasets spanning topics such as earth observation, healthcare, transportation, climate, genomics, economics, and more. Your goal is to extract insight, build a useful tool, discover an unexpected pattern, or create an application that demonstrates thoughtful use of data. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $5,000 distributed among the team + fast tracked interview Good luck, and happy hacking!

Announcing our Platinum sponsor Maximor AI challenge. Build an Agent for Financial Workflows Build an agent that learns to automate a real workflow in the Office of the CFO. Your agent should be able to execute a finance workflow, identify when and why it fails, and improve its own behavior over repeated runs. 🏆 Prizes 🥇1st place: $4,000 🥈2nd place: $2,000 🥉3rd place: $1,000

HackWeek is from 9/16 - 9/18 📍 at MIT. Come to campus for tech talks, fireside chats, and demos with our sponsors. Open to all Boston area students.

Announcing our diamond sponsor challenges. 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗟𝗮𝗸𝗲: 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮 𝗡𝗼𝗻-𝗕𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 AI has taken parts of the world by storm, but many people have yet to see what it can do. Some use it as glorified spellcheck or a search engine. Some watched an early model miscount the r’s in “strawberry” and never came back. Many are one great experience away from changing their minds. At Long Lake, we bring frontier AI to people and businesses that cutting-edge technology has often overlooked. Imagine an AI-powered product or experience that a skeptic would try, love, and want to use again. What would you create to give them that moment? 🏆 Prizes: TBD 𝗔𝗦𝗨𝗦: 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗡𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗦𝗨𝗦 Use ASUS hardware and/or Zenni Claw to help build your projects (bonus points if both). ASUS hardware will be available for hackers to check out during the hackathon on a first come first serve basis. 🏆 Prizes (will be awarded to each team member) 🥇1st place: ASUS ProArt PA278QGV monitor + $100 Brev credits 🥈2nd place: ASUS ZenScreen MB169CK-P portable monitor + $75 Brev credits 🥉3rd place: ASUS Jelly75 Keyboard KD201 + $50 Brev credits

Announcing our sponsors for HackMIT 2026 🃏 Huge thank you to all the sponsors who made this year possible! Sept 19 - 20, 2026. See you all very soon.

We're excited to announce this year's HackMIT keynote speaker: Grant Sanderson is the creator of @3blue1brown, known for making math and science intuitive through beautiful visual animations. Catch his talk at the opening ceremony on Sept. 19th in Kresge Auditorium.

1 month until HackMIT 2026 ... Sneak peek of our merch below 👀

We've extended the deadline to apply by 24 hours! Meet your future cofounders, life long friends, and the people who will change the world at HackMIT 2026. One weekend. One wild idea. Go all in and see where it takes you. Applications close TONIGHT at 11:59 PM ET (July 5th). Head over to hackmit [dot] org to apply. We can't wait to read yours 🃏!

ONE DAY LEFT to submit applications + we're launching our annual puzzle challenge today! For all puzzle enthusiasts and ctf solvers, check out our website to see if you can unlock (👀) the key to begin our admissions puzzle. Top 50 scorers who have also submitted an app by July 18th EOD will receive auto admission. Good luck 🃏

TWO DAYS LEFT to apply to HackMIT 2026! Here's a throwback to last year's hackathon for a taste at what's coming 👇 Apply by July 4th at hackmit [dot] org 🃏

3 DAYS LEFT to apply to HackMIT 2026! Have an idea you've been meaning to build out? Go all in for 24 hours and see where it takes you. Apply by July 4th 11:59PM ET at hackmit [dot] org 🃏.

One week left to apply to HackMIT 2026. Join us for a weekend of hacking, with incredible sponsors, speakers (👀), prizes and the best builders! We're flying out 1000 of the top university students to MIT (food and travel covered). Apply as a hacker, mentor, or judge at hackmit [dot] org by July 4th, 11:59 PM ET 🎆. We can't wait to see you there🃏.

hope yall get a good night of sleep before HackMIT tomorrow!

One of our favorite HackMIT traditions is our annual admissions puzzle, and this year’s just dropped!! Take a poke around on hackmit.org to try and find the puzzles… The top 50 scorers on the leaderboard receive auto admission to the event!!

#throwback to HackMIT 2024 with some hacker experience testimonials from last year’s event!

met some llamas @CalHacks

HackMIT 2025 Mentor and Judge applications are now open on plume.hackmit.org!! Come support one of the largest collegiate hackathons in the world with over 1000 participants annually

We’re super excited to announce that HackMIT 2025 is happening Sept 13-14 and applications are now open! Priority decisions are due July 4th and Regular due July 25th. Info about mentor/judge applications coming soon! Find all the details on our website hackmit.org.

how we're calibrating team to read thousands of hacker applications this year... it's not too late! apply by tonight at hackmit.org :)

It's that time of year—we're back, bigger and better than before ✨ Register now for HackMIT 2024 at plume.hackmit.org! 💫 More information about our application and deadlines is available at hackmit.org.

Join us today at 5 pm EDT to meet @InterSystems, and again at 6 pm for a fireside chat with @TomLeightonAKAM! All of our HackWeek events are at go.hackmit.org/hackweek21, and recordings of previous talks can be found at go.hackmit.org/youtube

We're kicking off HackWeek in 20 minutes (5:30 pm EDT)! Our first talk is a fireside chat with cryptographer Bruce Schneier @schneierblog - tune in at go.hackmit.org/hackweek21 🚀

Applications to HackMIT 2021 are due TOMORROW, Aug 13, at 11:50 pm EST! Register now to hack with over a thousand students from across the world at hackmit.org 🔨🌄

2 days left to register for HackMIT 2021! More information at hackmit.org 📢🛠

3 days left to register for HackMIT 2021; the deadline is Aug 13! Register at hackmit.org and email help@hackmit.org with any questions ⛅🌲

1 week left to register for HackMIT 2021, on Sept 18-19 -- featuring notable speakers, swag, workshops, tech talks, prizes, and much more! ⌛🌿 Apply at hackmit.org and email help@hackmit.org with any questions

Register for HackMIT 2021 now at hackmit.org! 💐🎉 We're excited to read your applications; reach us at help@hackmit.org with any questions. Registration will close on Friday, Aug 6.

Registration for HackMIT 2021 opens tomorrow, get excited! ⏳💡 More info about eligibility and hackathon logistics is available at hackmit.org

Just two more days until you can register for HackMIT 2021, held on Sept 18-19 ⛅🍀 We're incredibly excited to hear from you!

HackMIT 2021 is opening registration in 3 days! Get hyped, and mark your calendars for Sept 18-19 🌲🏔️ Detailed information is available at hackmit.org

Registration for HackMIT 2021 opens in 4 days; we're excited to present our first hybrid hackathon! 🌿

Introducing HackWeek fireside chat speaker: Qasar Younis! Qasar will be speaking at our first HackWeek event, tomorrow 9/14 6-7pm EDT! Join us at go.hackmit.org/fireside! instagram.com/p/CFGbSjsnjBj/

Introducing HackWeek fireside chat speaker: Pooja Sankar! instagram.com/p/CFBbCxkHJbC/

HackMIT 2020 starts in just over a week! For our final hacker spotlight, let's hear from Shashvat about his experience at HackMIT 2019! instagram.com/p/CE-kd55H79l/

Introducing fireside chat speaker: Linda Avey! instagram.com/p/CE7xT7en6gz/

Introducing fireside chat speaker: Tom Preston-Werner! instagram.com/p/CE0lPIWnJjh/

HackMIT is just two weeks away!! As we get excited for a phenomenal virtual event, let’s hear from Abhijit about his experience at HackMIT 2019: instagram.com/p/CEsivpJHAw9/ Don’t forget to confirm your attendance at HackMIT 2020 by 11:59 pm PDT tomorrow, September 4th 🤓✨

Introducing fireside chat speaker: Aileen Lee! instagram.com/p/CEph6a5nT-5/

It’s almost September, which means that HackMIT 2020 is just around the corner! Let’s take a look at Jaidev’s experience at HackMIT 2019: instagram.com/p/CEZz4hHHg3N/ We’re so excited to see everyone’s amazing projects in a few weeks! 🤩👏

Presenting keynote speaker: Luis von Ahn! instagram.com/p/CEXD5M3nCyR/

HackMIT 2020 is quickly approaching!! Here's Kyler's take on his experience working on Extend a H.A.N.D. at HackMIT 2019: instagram.com/p/CEH4HOHn5n0/ Get ready for a virtual experience like no other at HackMIT 2020!! 👏✨