Treehacks Cybersecurity Competition

During his senior year, Bright Chinemerem Nnadi ’23, electrical engineering major at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, participated in a cybersecurity hackathon called “TreeHacks” at Stanford University, February 17-19, 2023. The competition totaled 36 hours of intense teamwork and fun, all while Nnadi represented TAMU-CC on a national stage.

“At TreeHacks, I was able to meet people and it helped change my perspective about certain things. For example, most of the students there were from MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, and I always thought they were on a different level, but we were similar because we are all intelligent students, just from different institutions,” Nnadi said.  

 Nnadi met his team members for the first time on the day of the competition and they chose to solve a problem in healthcare and sustainability. To do so, they created an app to help farmers detect when bird flu has entered their poultry. The app relied on drone technology that would fly over the poultry, collect data, and send the data to an app on the farmer’s phone. The work required the team to create the app’s software and also give a presentation. Since the competition was 36 straight hours, the team slept around three hours each night to maximize the time they spent working together.

Nnadi said that he gained a lot of experience in TreeHacks competition because it prompted him to have an open mind and understand the different outlooks and ideas of his team members.

“Students gain some real-life experiences, like learning that going into the actual workforce not everyone wins, it gives them life lessons,” Nnadi said. "It also helps build relationships and make new friends.”