Many times you in your life you feel that you have a lot to do, it seems too overwhelming and stressful, however at the end of the day it feels that it was all worth it. My story of winning the SIH 2019 is similar, its full of ups and downs however it turned out to be the one of the best experiences of my life!

I have tried my best to include everything, however if you start getting bored, you can skip to the section you like :)

How it all started?

It all started when we got the news that the SMART INDIA HACKATHON is back, and I got really excited by this news. I had read about this hackathon in 2016 and was determined to take part in this. We even got a mail from our professor in my college motivating every student to take part in this. I was really excited and kept on refreshing the website each day.

However after some days, it started fading, I slowly forgot that something like this even existed! Then one day I get a text from my friend that is your team ready? That made me realize that I have lost my chance, since there were only three days left to submit the proposal.

Formation of the team - Immediately

I didn't wanna give up so I gathered all my friends and fixed up a meeting in my room, ( this was the biggest mistake as we wasted 3 hrs deciding whether we have the funds to travel -_- ) After a lot of discussion and arguments we made a group of five boys, however the biggest challenge was finding a girl!

Finding the girl - 1

This was the start of the most unexpected journey we thought we wont encounter, finding a girl for teaming up is as tough as finding a girl to date.

We had already been rejected by one girl as she was too busy with her work.. (she could not give time to us), so we started looking for someone else to participate with us in the competition. I knew this girl, lets call her "A", A was my friend before college as well and she was interested in computers alot, so i contacted her and she agreed! We were satisfied and our hunt for chosing the best problem statement begins!

Giving it a chance

We had previously looked at some of the problem statements and had shortlisted two or three, so we started with those, as expected they were now not in our "reach",they already had more than 100 idea submissions and this was enough to demotivate all of us.

So we all took out our laptops and started browsing through all the problem statements, it was a tiring process and we were slowly getting irritated, as everything seemed too difficult or too complex to understand. ( For example: ISRO's problem statements)

After hours of searching and searching, we shortlisted four problems to work with, they were of mixed difficulties, and we were too happy with our accomplishment that we left it there -_-

After 2 days, we realized that we havent created our proposals yet and so we had another meeting at 10pm in my room and we again spent 30 mins on discussing whether we should really try makinga proposal, it seemed too tough at that time, we saw alot of yt videos and started writing a draft.

We got bored soon, however one team member didnt give up and he began making some diagrams ( use case diagrams ) to include in our proposal for the easiest problem statement ( which we didnt understand at all atm. ), he made one diagram and left his seat. This job was now taken up by another team mate, who made the diagrams for two more problems. We ended up submitting the proposals just 5-6 hrs before the deadline and they were the shittiest proposals anyone could have made!

The totally unexpected selection

The results started coming out and we were starting to see the tension build up in everyone who had submitted thier proposals, two days had passed, so many lists had released and we were in none of them. Two out of three submissions of ours had been rejected. We lost all our hopes and forgot about it totally.

On the third day, I was having a lazy day and the whole day I did not check the website, we had lost hope and everyone was busy in their work, I was chilling in my friend's room when one of my seniors called me up. We had recently won an hackathon in ludhiana so i thought he called me up for that. He picked up the phone and said, "Party kab dega?" (where is my party?)...

I replied that I will give it soon as I said when i won the hackathon. However, he said something which got my attention and I asked him which part is he talking about? That's when I got the news that our team has been selected for SIH 2019 grand finale! It was party time and we had a big pizza party.

Photo by Sudo on Unsplash