2023

In 2023, I successfully led the planning and execution of WTH for the second year in a row. We achieved our lofty targets: 400 participants and $50,000 in fundraising and provided an overwhelmingly positive experience for our participants.

Knowing I had a winning formula with the 2022 plan, I wanted to expand the event to be able to bring it to even more students. At its core, WTH is about helping students gain experience, and I wanted to make sure anyone that wanted to participate could do so. So, I set our fundraising target at 2.5x 2022’s, to be able to host 400 participants, 2x 2022’s capacity.

With generous support from Tiktok, Espressif, DBS, Accenture, Grain, IMDA and Govtech, as well as various offices in SUTD, we were able to fully fund the event for 400 participants, while improving the experience. We also hosted 4 panel talks, with industry experts from small startups to big banks to community-centric makerspaces! These allowed participants to gain insight into how engineers across the industry think.

Participant feedback for the event was overwhelmingly positive, with many applauding the food, from Grain, as well as the judging format, which gave everybody face time with the judging industry experts.

2022

In 2022, I led a team of 10 students in the planning and successful organization of SUTD’s flagship hackathon, What The Hack. Together with a friend, I raised $22,000 from 7 industry-leading companies to fully the fund the hackathon, making it free for all participants. WTH was successfully run in Dec 2022 for 200 participants, building solutions in the areas of sustainability, inclusivity and social good.

As a project, WTH was intended to benefit students first and foremost. Through a competitive and collaborative environment, we hoped to give students a platform to showoff their creativity and skills. At the same time, we wanted to promote the causes of sustainability, inclusivity and social good. As a whole, we showed students that their skills and creativity can be used for good and allowed them to have a say in the future of technology and society.

On a personal level, WTH 2022 was the biggest project I had ever worked on. With just a team of 10, we were relatively lean and I’m proud that we were able to pull it off. As an experience, I learnt more from WTH than anything else in my life. I learnt how important it was to make sure everyone in the team are on the same page, and how to create a conducive working environment such that every team member is able to reach their full potential. Through the process of fundraising, I learnt to understand the needs of the a business partner in a negotiation.

For sponsorships, we worked for months pitching and navigating legal agreements to finally secure Indeed, GovTech, AWS, Accenture, IMDA and NCS.