Founded in 2013, Purdue Hackers is an organization of students who ship creative technical projects & build marketable skills. We're the largest computer science organization at Purdue University, a top 20 CS program.

The Problem

University recruiting is a frustratingly low-ROI venture. Companies and students come to career fairs to form personal connections, but the flood of students prevents interactions from being deep, making it difficult for both parties to filter for their best matches.

Meanwhile, CS & Engineering students struggle to build extracurricular projects, even though they know doing so is the best way to build real technical skills & stand out as applicants. Building a project is hard: they need to find the right idea, set aside time to get started, and see it through, all while juggling academic & social obligations.

Career fairs don't effectively filter for the best candidates, and students struggle to build the projects that help them stand out. Purdue Hackers facilitates technical projects, creating & naturally filtering for talented engineers.

The Solution: Purdue Hackers 💛⚡

Purdue Hackers is a community for building technical projects, like apps, websites, digital art, robotics, and microelectronics. Our members—“hackers”—form groups & make weird, wacky, & creative things together. An average hacker starts a project at one of our hour-long biweekly workshops, builds it with friends at one of our weekly Hack Nights, and ships it in our online community.

Many hackers make their closest friends within Purdue Hackers, who push them on projects & consistently raise their ambitions. This rigor inspires everyone to make projects that challenge their abilities, including beginners.

All our events are opt-in, and hackers only work on extracurricular projects they deeply care about. This brings them to Purdue Hackers out of genuine passion instead of obligation, which enables them to spend more time on their projects & grow tremendously.

The result is an extraordinarily high concentration of talented & motivated engineers. Hackers have interned & worked at highly-respected companies like Apple, Google, Figma, & Vercel, and started their own companies.

Our Programs

Purdue Hackers runs three core programs:

Hack Night

A mini hackathon every Friday night at the local makerspace, with 60 attendees on average. Students have uninterrupted time to work on creative projects with friends—including an object-tracking camera, an alternative time system, a meter-tall sign powered by a custom PCB, a camera-based drawing website, an (ethical) iOS exploit, and a game about word embeddings, among many others. Hack Night ends very late at night, often as late as 6:00am.

Workshops

Hour-long sessions every two weeks that introduce attendees to new concepts, like generative art, shaders, word embeddings, and interpreters. Everyone leaves with a finished project that they can continue working on. Attendee count ranges from 50 to 150. View a sponsored workshop.

Community

Where You Come In

All the most talented, creative, & dedicated engineers congregate in Purdue Hackers to make real projects. Sponsoring Purdue Hackers is an unparalleled opportunity to get directly in front of these engineers with your company's brand & job postings.

We want to partner with you on a workshop, Hack Night, or other event of your choice (example), through which you will gain direct recruiting access to our members.

Our annual budget is $6,000, which goes toward purchasing food & materials for Hack Night & workshops, as well as occasionally funding student projects.

All tiers are negotiable. If you don't see your ideal partnership, we'd be happy to find it with you.

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Thank you for your time. We look forward to working with you!