The 2019 MLH North America Hackathon Season (running from August 2018 — July 2019) included nearly 220 amazing events, 70,000 hackers, and 11,000 projects and today we are excited to announce the top hacker school of the North America Season! We’ll be publishing the Europe rankings later this week, so stay tuned.

After crunching the numbers from all of our events this past season, the results are in and the winner and top hacker school of the 2019 North America MLH Hackathon Season winner is…

The University of Toronto!

UofTHacks - Hackathon from University of Toronto, the 2019 Top Hacker School
UofTHacks Spring 2019

The University of Toronto hosted three MLH hackathons: UofTHacks, MakeUofT, and Hack the Valley for a total of 1,300 hackers! UofTHacks hosted their sixth iteration, MakeUofT was the first Canadian makeathon to be part of the League, and Hack the Valley hosted their third annual event for 750 hackers! 

Toronto Organizer Found Out They Won at MLH Hackcon VII

From last year’s standings, The University of Toronto jumped from 2nd to 1st place by doubling the number of events where their hackers won prizes and nearly doubling the number of events they participated in! Canada, yet again, reigns supreme in the MLH standings as the Top Hacker School in North America.

Waterloo, the top hacker school last Season, stayed at roughly the same level of events and wins from year to year. UMD College Park and Georgia Institute of Technology stayed in the Top 10 as well, and we saw UT Austin rise from 18th to 9th place and Georgia State University rise from 31st to 6th place to join them. One of the biggest upsets we saw was McMaster University rising from 26th place to 4th place this year by increasing the number of events their hackers participated in by more than 50%. 

The Top 10 schools for the 2019 Season:

  1. The University of Toronto
  2. The University of Waterloo
  3. Georgia Institute of Technology
  4. McMaster University
  5. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
  6. Georgia State University
  7. New York University
  8. The University of Maryland, College Park
  9. The University of Texas at Austin
  10. The University of California, Berkeley

You can find the full top hacker school rankings here so you can see how you did! Read more about the Europe rankings here.

MLH Hackcon VI Family Photo

Want to see your university on this list? You can earn points for your school in the coming year through a combination of:

  • Merit points (earned when students from your school build winning projects)
  • Participation points (earned when students from your school participate at a hackathon)

Never been to a hackathon before? Don’t worry!

Hackathons are for beginners too and we’ve seen first-time hackers win some of the largest events. Check out the upcoming events for the 2020 Hackathon Season! Remember that hackathons are about Learning, Building and Sharing above everything! 

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