The competitors will come from as far away as California and as close to home as Clemson to pull an all-nighter, but it won’t be for a grade or research project.
It’s all for South Carolina’s largest hackathon, CUhackit ’26.
In a 24-hour event starting on the evening of Feb. 27, college students from across the country will marshal their programming, engineering, designing, teamwork and product-pitching skills to tackle a challenge that will be disclosed at the start of the competition.
It’s one of three hackathons held each year at Clemson University, and part of a growing hackathon community spreading across the Southeast.
Challenges at past Clemson hackathons have ranged from finding innovative uses for smart-phone sensors to crunching NASA data to identify exoplanets.
Students fuel their all-night hack sessions with energy drinks, dance breaks, live bands and just plain raw enthusiasm, creating an atmosphere that is as fun as it is educational, with some friendly competition thrown into the mix.
The hackathons give students a chance to flex their creative muscles, add a line to their resumes and learn directly from industry leaders about internships, job opportunities and the skills they will need after graduation.
For this year’s CUhackit, organizers are expecting about 300 participants, mostly undergraduates along with a few graduate students from at least 39 colleges and universities across the country. They will compete for prizes in four tracks: most innovative, hack for good, best execution and best use of hardware.
The energy for this year’s CUhackit was already starting to percolate as the chief student organizers Malia Fairbanks and Hazel Torek made their final preparations.
“The environment sets the tone for how the 24 hours are going to be,” Fairbanks said. “You make so many friends, you learn so much. It’s a little competitive, which I personally love. The whole atmosphere that a hackathon creates is so unique compared to a normal class setting, and I think that’s the first thing that draws students in.”
Another big draw is the professional networking, Torek said.
“It’s great for your career development, especially for computer science and engineering students,” Torek said. “You can get projects on your resume if you don’t have job experience and connect with possible employers through our sponsors.”
Industry partners play an active role in hackathons through mentoring, workshops and judging. They give companies a chance to see what kind of talent is in the university pipeline and get their brand names in front of the future workforce.
In some cases, the events lead to job offers, and the solutions get on course to becoming real-world products.
Jacob Davis, a junior computer science major, said in one hackathon he created a game that allows users to play a piano in virtual reality, and now it’s a line on his resume that serves an ice breaker.
“Every interview I’ve had for internships since then, they’ve mentioned that project first before other things,” Davis said.
He has already landed four– two with Clemson, one with NASA and one with Cadence Design Systems.
Julia Holzbach, a sophomore majoring in computer information systems, was on an all-freshman team that won the hack-for-good category in last year’s CUhackit.
The software the team created was designed to use handwriting to help diagnose early signs of neurodegenerative disease. The team continued developing the software after the competition and is now working with a faculty member to turn it into a product.
Holzbach plans to return to CUhackit this year.
“The nature of a hackathon is just fun already,” she said. “You’re pulling all-nighters, so by the end, you’re just laughing at any little thing, and you’re around a bunch of other people who want to innovate and create.”
Hackathons are a year-round endeavor at Clemson– and they are almost completely run by students.
HelloWorld is held each fall and focuses on first-year undergraduates. The NASA Space Apps Challenge came to Clemson for the first time in 2025 and was widely considered an out-of-this-world success.
Students have also twice helped lead Bothohacks, an international hackathon hosted at the University of Botswana during Clemson’s spring break.
While the challenges are focused on making use of technology, Clemson’s hackathons are open to students of all majors. In some cases, for example, physics students join to test their computing skills, marketing majors gain experience in selling products to customers and arts students help design what it looks like.
Jacob Sorber, a computer science professor who serves as an advisor for Clemson’s hackathons, said the events give students a chance to be with their friends and to get some experience in building things.
The downside to participating? There is none, he said.
“You learn how to think on your feet, because you have a deadline and you have to get something working, and that’s really powerful,” Sorber said. “Because you’re working in teams, those teams have people with different strengths. It mimics a lot of what you see in the real world in a way that can be difficult to replicate in a classroom.”
