Forty students, one weekend, and a brief with no clear answer. We've run this format enough times to notice a pattern, and it isn't flattering to the professional world.
What campus teams get right
They start building on day one. There's no week of alignment, no stakeholder map, no deck explaining what they're about to do. The constraint — 48 hours — makes deliberation obviously expensive, so they skip it.
They also kill ideas fast. When something isn't working at hour twenty, a student team drops it. A funded team protects it, because someone senior said it was a good idea in a meeting.
What they get wrong
Almost everything about users. Campus teams build what's interesting to build. The best weekend project we saw solved a problem the team had invented and nobody had.
The lesson
Neither group is doing it right. Students have the speed and no compass; funded teams have the compass and spend six weeks polishing it. The trick is caring about the user with a student's willingness to abandon a bad idea at hour twenty.
Written by Mr. Shoaib
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