We Submitted at 2:37 A.M., Six Hours Before the Deadline

Two months before the actual hackathon started, I asked two of my friends if they wanted to do a hackathon with me. They said yes. That's the part of the story that doesn't sound dramatic at all, but it's the part that determined everything that came after it. We were all computer science students, but none of us had built anything close to what the USAII Global AI Hackathon was asking for. So we spent two months preparing for it. We divided up what we needed to learn and roughly assigned ownership of different parts of the eventual build. We were a team of three. One teammate would handle the frontend and design. Another would help me with the backend. I'd handle the rest of the backend myself, plus the final documentation and demo video, as the team lead. We studied. We practiced. We took the qualifier exam and ranked 95th out of the 424 accepted submissions in our track to make it into build week. At that moment, I remember feeling excited about build week and thinking “We’ve