Many times 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, it’s 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. I had read about this hackathon in 2016 and was determined to take part in this. This remained for a few days before it drained out. 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 tasking about the status of my team. 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 would never 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 in the competition. I knew a girl, let’s call her “A”, A was my friend before college as well and she was interested in computers a lot, so I contacted her and she agreed! We were satisfied and our hunt for choosing the best problem statement begins!

Giving it a chance

We had previously looked at some of the problem statements and had shortlisted two to three from them, 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 each and every problem-statement, it was a tiring process and we were slowly getting irritated, 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 haven’t 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 making a proposal(it seemed too tough at that time, we saw a lot of YouTube videos and started writing a draft.)

We got bored soon, however one team member didn’t give up and began making some diagrams ( use case diagrams ) to include in our proposal for the easiest problem-statement ( which we didn’t understand at all at that moment. ), he made one diagram and left his seat. This job was now taken up by another teammate, 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 seeing the tension build up in everyone who had submitted their 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, 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 a 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 the SIH 2019 grand finale! We finally had a big pizza party.

End of Excitement and time to WORK

After the party, we realized that there is a lot of work to be done to move forward. We made a list of things to do and it looked something like this :

• Fill up all the forms and confirm participation
• Manage Funds and talk to professors
• Find two mentors
• Understand the problem statement
• Start building the prototype
• Get Documents signed from the dean
• Manage a T-shirt and Banner and standee for the event
• Try not to freak out :)

For the next few days we worked on getting our documents ready.(It took weeks actually to finalize everything), we submitted the initial confirmation and stuff, and now we focused on Finding a Mentor.

Finding a mentor and also a girl

The next part was to find a mentor who would help us understand the problem statement better and actually guide us on how to proceed with the model.

However, between all this we got a news that, the female member in our team can’t actually accompany us to CHENNAI (our nodal center), and so now we had to find a replacement, we didn’t want any second year member in our team and wanted our team to just be full of first year students, and so it became extra tough to find someone. After getting rejected by almost 5 girls, we finally found the one and now we again focused on finding the Mentor.

Mentor looking is a tough job and we wanted to make sure that we get the one that is the most suitable and qualified to guide us through. Now, our problem statement was based on STP(Sewage treatment plant) monitoring and reporting, and we found the perfect person to mentor us in this. A professor in our institute had a PHD in STPs and he was the guy we needed all the time. We contacted him and went forward with the process.

Mentoring session and Brain Storming

Understand before implementing it.

This is the advice I’ll give to anyone trying to build something, first understand what you are working for and what does it require.

Did I mention we had to pay almost ₹4000 extra per person because we couldn’t decide on when to book the tickets .

We visited the STP in our college and understood all its operations and working. Our mentor helped us a lot in this. This was one of the biggest advantage that we had over our competitors.

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