Hawkathon 2026

Overview

Hawkathon 2026, themed '#TechForCareer,' challenges undergraduate student teams to build AI-powered solutions that improve how people prepare for, find, and succeed in their careers. The focus is on creating practical systems that solve real problems, going beyond basic apps to build usable and impactful tools. Judges will be looking for projects with a clear workflow, strong implementation, and responsible design.

Requirements

This hackathon is for undergraduate students at the University of Louisiana Monroe only, and participants must be of legal age. Teams must consist of 3 to 4 members. You are required to build a working prototype or proof-of-concept that addresses a career-related problem and demonstrates a clear input-processing-output workflow. It's essential to include a functional demo and meaningfully use AI, automation, or intelligent logic. When submitting, you'll need to provide a project description covering the problem, target users, features, how it works, the role of AI, challenges, and future improvements. A public GitHub repository with a clear README file containing project details, setup instructions, and technologies used is also mandatory. Your project should be focused, simple, and well-executed, though not necessarily production-ready.

Prizes

There's a total of $1,500 in cash prizes. The first-place team will win $1,000, the second-place team will receive $300, and the third-place team will get $200. These prizes are awarded based on the innovation, implementation, functionality, user impact, and overall quality of the submitted projects.