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.

We’ve partnered with companies like Facebook, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, and Vercel, as well as run an AMA with Steve Wozniak.

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 workshops, builds it with friends at one of our weekly Hack Nights, and ships it at the Show.

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.

Read more about our philosophy.

Where You Come In

Purdue Hackers runs three core programs: workshops & tech talks, Hack Night, and the Show. We want to partner with you on one of these programs, through which you will gain direct recruiting access to our members.

Hack Night

A mini hackathon every Friday night at the local makerspace, with 80 attendees on average. Students have uninterrupted time to work on creative projects with friends—including an alternative time system, a meter-tall sign powered by a custom PCB, a camera-based drawing website, (ethical) iOS exploits, and an entire computing stack made from NAND gates. Hack Night ends very late at night, often as late as 6:00am.

Workshops and Tech Talks

Workshops are hour-long sessions 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.

View a sponsored workshop

Tech talks are workshop-flavored events, but for sponsors to talk about something you want to get in front of students. The talk can be technical, about your product or company, a recruiting event, or all of the above. You control the content, we get it in front of students.

Attendance for workshops and tech talks ranges from 50 to 150.

The Show

The Fall 2024 Show is taking place in the Rueff Galleries on campus, on Sunday, December 8th from 2-6pm.

Custom

If none of the other options resonate with you, or you want some combination of the above tiers, we have run entirely custom events with sponsors in the past (example: HammerWars), and we would like to discuss what a version of this could look like with you.

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

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Via workshops & tech talks, Hack Night, the Show, or a custom event designed by you, we want to work with you to get in front of our uniquely talented students. Your support helps cover our annual budget of $10,000, which goes toward purchasing food & materials for events and funding student projects.

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.

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