How to Run a Successful Intern Hackathon

Internships are a great way to introduce your company and culture to high potential students starting out in their careers. They help with building and maintaining a relationship with colleges and universities, increasing brand familiarity with their students, the past experience of graduates who have built a career in your org, and demonstrating to students the potential to grow their professional experience with your organisation.

I have worked with Mastercard’s intern committee since 2018, and in that time have seen the number of students grow from less than 10 to and average of 40 per year. This is due to the success of the program in attracting, and retaining, high quality graduates who stay with Mastercard for years. One of the premium events of the internship calendar is the annual hackathon, which attracts interest from everyone in Mastercard’s Dublin tech hub.

However, it hasn’t been easy landing on the right formula for a successful intern hackathon. After half a decade of experience heres what I have learned from running the intern hackathon.

Setting the Challenge

The core of, and most important aspect of, the hackathon is the challenge itself. Make the goal too broad and interns will be dealing with anxiety trying to understand what you are asking for and it their ideas are acceptable, make it too focused and you will see little creativity and a lot of repetition across teams. We tried both approaches over the last few years and got great feedback from the interns each time.

What we ended up with in 2023 worked perfectly.

We kept the idea for the challenge broad in nature, to begin with. We then had sessions with the interns about a month out from the actual event itself to help them generate ideas and provide them with early feedback about how close (or not) they were to our expectations. These sessions proved extremely popular and were pivotal to the eventual success of the hackathon.

From these sessions we then had a weekly check in with the interns to ensure they were validating their ideas. In advance of the hackathon itself we asked them to develop personas to ensure their idea solved a real world problem for a specific user. We also tasked them with finding some basic market fit and a high level overview of revenue potential. All of these “mini tasks” in advance of the actual hackathon helped each team refine what started out as a broad idea into something they began to understand and were confident to work on during the hackathon itself.

Confident is a key term here. Presenting in front of some of the top people at a company is daunting task for anyone, when your only experience thus far is the internship it is terrifying. By building a pathway for the interns to be self-assured in their idea you grant them the freedom to be creative.

Expected Outputs & Outcomes

In the early days of running the intern hackathons I really struggled with getting the interns to understand what we expected from them. Specifically about output, what format should it be, what software to use to create a prototype, could we share previous examples with them. They wanted really focused information that they could copy from but I wanted to ensure they had the space to think of something new.

To address this we became very specific on the outputs and gave them examples of these, while being careful to ensure a diverse range of outcomes. By this I mean we clarified and provided data on:

• The timing, format, design, and structure of presentations that had previously won

• Demo examples of highly rated prototype designs

• An example presentation run through by someone outside of the intern cohort

• Access to graduates who have previously taken part

We found that by giving the interns the structure of the assets they were expected to produced helped reduce their anxiety about the process and allowed them to focus on their idea. I term their ideas as the outcome and we kept this more vague and ambiguous by avoiding giving them too much information about previous winning ideas. In other words we were happy to say to the interns this is the structure and format of a presentation that last year’s team won with but with the actual winning idea removed.

This meant the interns were given the feeling of safety needed to be able to generate ideas and be innovative while at the same time avoiding repeated ideas both amongst the competing groups and from previous cohorts.

Judging

Another aspect we learned to tweak was the judging. This benefits both the judges and the interns by putting a common structure around what the teams will be asked to create and what the judges are expected to score.

We designed a score card for the judges that covered ideation/creativity, presentation skills, prototypes, feasibility, and commercial opportunity. Each section had a set amount of points that could be awarded and description of what the interns were expected to demonstrated for each area covered. This information was shared with the interns prior to the hackathon so they knew what to focus on.

In order to give some flexibility to the judges we also added a “judge’s choice” section worth a set amount of points. This helps support the judges, who we choose from different backgrounds in the company, to rank the interns on the judge’s own expectations. Once all presentations concluded, the judges are given time to go off and deliberate on an overall winner, second place, and best presenter.

Summary

Its very hard to get a hackathon to run smoothly right from the off, expect to make mistakes along the way. Listening to feedback from previous interns, judges, and audiences provides a fantastic way to learn from what you have done before. It is very much worth putting the effort into running an intern only hackathon, it gives the interns an incredible opportunity to demonstrate their skills to a wider audience, create a buzz in your office as the intern’s teams support their efforts, and promotes a culture of inclusion and creativity in your organisation.