Hack the North 2025

Imagine this - an 8 hour long bus journey on your birthday … Sounds fun? Well, not really. Unless you’re attending Canada’s biggest hackathon afterwards.

After a long awaited time, it finally happened - HackTheNorth 2025. An exciting weekend packed with informative workshops, awesome company reps - all at the University of Waterloo. From the opening ceremonies (shoutout to Lazardis) to the food distribution to the judging - everything showed the massive scale at which the event was run and just how effortlessly things seemed to happen. Behind this goes the efforts put in by the organizers and volunteers who start working as early as 6 months before!

The workshops, sponsor booths and the super smart people made me realize just how well connected UWaterloo is in the industry. From seeing some of the biggest trading firms as sponsors to attending their workshops, it was truly a weekend of intense learning and creating.

They had free, university provided buses to some of the neighboring universities which showed just how dedicated the organizing team was to bringing talented people together. They also gave travel reiumbursements to people travelling from outside of Waterloo so people from other countries could also come. As a result, there were people from multiple countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, USA and many others.

Goose Games was a cool thing they did. You basically got points for completing certain tasks and acitivities (ex - showing up to workshops, food, engaging with the community etc) and you could redeeem these points for exclusive things like stickers, posters, hoodies etc. I couldn’t get a hoodie since they were all gone by the time I reached the score needed to unlock that but nonetheless, it was a good way to get more engagement. I remember something similar at UofTHacks 12 in January this year and I feel more hackathons could adapt this technique.

How could I visit Waterloo and not meet Mr. Goose himself? This (un)official mascot of the university was seen around campus multiple times, greeting all the hackers, handing out energy drinks and even posing for pictures. Funny enough, my team and I managed to see some real geese on Sunday right after our closing ceremony. That moment made me realize just how important part of the community are the geese and why Waterloo loves them so much!

One thing that was sort of expected but also not quite was the delay in the judging process. That made me realize that no matter how big the hackathon is, judging delays are something out of control and can happen to any event and at any point of time. Be it McGill, UofT or UWaterloo - every organizer struggles with this crucial time period. It makes sense since there are multiple teams rushing to different rooms for judging by different sponsors so some delays are bound to happen. What I did like was that they didn’t push back the ending time of the closing ceremonies even though they started a bit late - probably cause a lot of people had flights back home right after the ceremony.

As much as I didn’t want the weekend to finish, I am back in Montreal after a yet another 8 hour bus journey. Maybe it was the freedom to not worry about any upcoming assignment deadlines in those 2 days or just the excitement of building something fun at one of the top engineering schools in the world - whatever be it, the weekend was amazing. As I return to my new (technically the old) normal of course deadlines, I’ll remember the good moments and look forward to the other upcoming hackathons at McGill and beyond.

If you’d like to know more about what my team and I did for our project, check out our project CogniVerse - making every idea teachable.