YHack Logo

YHack 2014 was held October 31 – November 2nd, Halloween weekend 2014. Blogging about last year’s YHack I quoted one of the organizers, stating that “It’s hard to predict the impact that YHack will have,” then he concluded, ”but we know for sure that it is a move in the right direction.” At that time he could not have known that during the ensuing 12 months significant events would signify that the university was moving in the right direction regarding supporting student oriented initiatives concerning innovation, design and entrepreneurship.

• CEID celebrated its second anniversary and has become a stalwart among American academic maker spaces focused on supporting and fostering student-led design and innovation.
• Yale Entrepreneur Magazine completed its first year of operation after being dormant for many years. Also it has become the publication of record for all student oriented entrepreneurship. It shifted its focus from undergraduates only to all Yale students.
• Yale Entrepreneurial Institute expanded its programs to include social entrepreneurship and a technology bootcamp to teach students how to code.
• Yale School of Management hired Kyle Jensen as Director, Program on Entrepreneurship and tasked him with expanding the curriculum surrounding entrepreneurship. Eight new courses were added.
• InnovateHealth Yale, an initiative out of the School of Public Health is focused on entrepreneurialism in the public health and healthcare space.

YHack, from an anthropological perspective, is more than an event: its social significance is that it is an example of the university’s support of students who want to engage in self-directed learning. And it is a symbol of the new culture of learning that is fueled by curiosity and a desire to fill the gap between what students are taught in the traditional classroom and what they desire to learn.

The wide toolbox cohort are hackers because they are also trying to do something clever to beat a component of the establishment; they are trying to overcome the traditional higher education system. They recognize the need to use university resources to hack a new culture of learning that entails taking ownership of how, why, what, where and when they learn. As hackers the wide toolbox cohort is also driven by something that is more sustainable than making money or following the traditional status tract to Wall Street, or law, or medicine. They seem to operate more independently; they follow their passion to pursue their curiosity. It took me a while to get this point because I thought that my initial research project was about how the educational elite were driven to be innovators and entrepreneurs. Deep into my ethnographic research, I discovered that I was witnessing something that was much more sustainable and profound than a student pursuing an isolated idea about creating a business or making some gizmo. Joe gave me an enlightened perspective when I asked him about his interest in creating a startup. This is what he said:

I’m not one of those people who wants to start a startup just for the sake of being able to say that I started a startup. I’m not opposed to the idea, but I’m also not obsessed with doing it. If I happen to have an idea that a) I think would add value to the world and b) would best manifest itself in the form of a business, then I would start a venture. If not, I would do other work that I find meaningful. It’s my belief that the best kind of startups form organically out of a good idea, rather than out of the desire to start a business just for the hell of it.

Joe’s notion of what is meaningful is in line with the viewpoint of Jason, one of the organizers of YHack 2.0. Jason made the following point about coding for its innate beauty. “If you are an English major you write for class, but you also write outside of class because that is fun; that is what you love to do.” He continued about the changing nature of coders today, “Perhaps because CS majors are so employable now, you get a lot of people who are mercenaries. They learn the skills but they are not generally interested in computers; they just want to make a living.” YHack and similar hackathons encourage people to want more, to want to be curious about computers and to enjoy their ability to make them do what they want them to do. This is the essence of hacking: putting something into the world because you love learning and mastering your chosen field.

This phenomenon, Tom Lehman, host of the YHack award ceremony and co-founder of Genius (formerly called Rap Genius), referred to as “taking the roast out of the oven.” Getting stuff done.