As one of the biggest organizations on campus, VandyHacks is more than a major hackathon organizer - it is an integral part of the entire Computer Science culture at Vanderbilt. Our mission to empower, educate, and inspire our peers to discover the creative and collaborative aspect of using technology to make the world a better place.
We strive to build a close-knit and collaborative community within VandyHacks board and propagate this culture externally through our events. This document outlines our core values that are extremely important to our culture and guide our decision making process.
We seek consistency in our actions, words, and beliefs. We are honest with what we did, are doing, and are going to do. We trust each other and strive to achieve maximum transparency - open communication within teams and across the board is extremely important to us.
We are honest about our individual viewpoints and more open about expressing them in a public dialogue. If we do not agree with each others' views, we try to understand the reasons behind disagreements, collaboratively discover the truth, and come to an agreement that is objectively beneficial for all.
We embrace diverse viewpoints and see value in discovering the truth through intellectually honest conversations. We value each and every board member as a human being - approaching interactions with respect for our peers, we strive to nurture strong friendships within the board.
Human relationships are important to us - while being focused on our mission, we try to help and support each other beyond our work. Enjoying each others' company and developing strong friendships, we achieve synergy that drives great organizational results.
With great resources at our disposal and extremely talented people on our board, we aim to maximize our impact in the community. We strive to learn, grow, and achieve greater heights every year.
Focusing on personal and organizational growth, we are purposeful with setting high targets and milestones to achieve our mission. When taking on a project, we think in terms of achieving the best possible outcome, be it delivering best hacker experience, recording highest-quality workshops, or creating the most interesting challenges.
Maintaining high standards for results inspires us and makes our work extremely rewarding.
We are excited to come up with new ideas and readily implement them. We encourage initiative on every level and across all committees. Every member of the organization has power to drive great change: we try create opportunities for cross-committee innovation and individual initiative of our members. We do not get discouraged by risks associated with coming up with something absolutely new: we embrace them and do our best to succeed.
Moreover, we are not afraid to fail - we recognize that making mistakes is the important part of the journey. We treat failures as opportunities for growth and get excited to make sure we learn from them. We are open and honest about things that are not working, and we try to learn and adapt.