Judging at MedHack 2021

I had a great time today helping with the judging of the MedHack Hull event. Over the weekend teams had been working away on their ideas (although it wasn’t all work and no play, they found time for some Pictionary and Among Us. Over lunch I got to chat with them about their entries.

It was great. I took away a number of things from the event. First you can totally do these things online very successfully. The organisation was top notch and the teams all used Discord to talk to each other and the judges. All I had to do was enter the chat group, fire up my webcam, admit I knew nothing and then wait to be told all about their idea. Then I popped some writeup into a shared spreadsheet and moved on to the next team.

All the teams were wonderful. There was a huge range of different ideas all centred around the medical theme. I’ve watched a lot of presentations over the years and one thing that struck me today was how we have moved on in the quality of presentation skills (or perhaps this was just a very good bunch). Either way, It was great fun. I told as many teams as I could that they should make participation in these events “pay for themselves” by making sure that they form part of the “brand” that they should be building as they go through life.

Kudos to the folks at Hull for organising the event. I hope that they run it again next year.