We Went for the Vibes. We Came Back With Runner-Up.
How a last-minute text to uni friends turned into a national hackathon, a sleepless night, and second place at GIKI.
It started with a text.
I messaged a few friends from university — something like "there's a hackathon happening at GIKI, anyone down?" No serious prep. No strategy. Honestly, we just wanted to get out, have fun, and see what the vibe was like. We weren't going there to win anything.
We came back Runner-Up at a national hackathon.
How It Actually Started
Five teams from our class at FAST University made the trip. We paired up in twos, I ended up with my friend Ali — and we called ourselves Team Arcane.
No particular reason. It just sounded right.
Neither of us had any idea what we were walking into. We found out when we got there — this wasn't just a university competition. NeoHack was a national hackathon, organized by the AI Frontier Society at GIKI and supported by the Precision Medicine Lab. There were students from universities all across Punjab. Serious teams. Prepared teams.
And then there was us — two guys who showed up mostly for the experience.
The Problem They Gave Us
Once we were in, the fun-trip energy shifted pretty quickly.
The problem was real. We were handed a dataset of actual cancer patients and asked to:
- Determine whether a patient's cancer was progressing
- Identify the disease stage
- Explore possible risk factors
This wasn't a toy problem. This was medical data — the kind of stuff that, in the real world, affects someone's diagnosis, their treatment, their life. That weight hit different at midnight when you're staring at a laptop screen and running on nothing but energy drinks.
The Night We Didn't Sleep
We didn't sleep. Not even a little.
The whole night was just Ali and me, heads down, building. GIKI has that campus energy — even at 3AM there were people everywhere, teams grinding, the occasional burst of someone's code finally working followed by a very loud celebration.
We split the work and moved fast.
We built two things:
A patient data model — trained to analyze clinical records and predict cancer progression and staging from structured data.
And an image classification model built on ResNet18 — trained to look at cancer slide images, the kind a pathologist examines, and classify what it was seeing.
Two models. One goal — the starting point for an AI diagnostic assistant that could genuinely help a clinician make faster, better decisions.
By the time the sun came up, we had something. Not perfect. Not finished. But real.
When We Found Out
When the results came in and they called Runner-Up — Ali and I just looked at each other.
We came for fun. We hadn't slept. We were representing FAST University at a national competition we didn't even know was national until we arrived. And we'd just placed second out of teams that came prepared.
That moment was genuinely one of those you don't forget.
Not because of the placement — though that felt amazing — but because of everything that led to it. The last-minute decision to go. The five teams from our class all showing up together. The sleepless night building something that actually mattered. Representing our university without even planning to.
What I Took Away
A few things stuck with me.
sometimes the best experiences are the unplanned ones. If I'd known it was a national hackathon going in, I might have psyched myself out. Not knowing meant we just showed up, did the work, and let it speak for itself.
One More Thing
Shoutout to every team from FAST that made the trip that day. Five teams from the same class, all competing at a national level — that's something to be proud of, regardless of results.
And shoutout to Ali. Best person to be exhausted and building with at 4AM.
Team Arcane.
NeoHack was hosted at GIKI University, organized by the AI Frontier Society - GIKI and supported by the Precision Medicine Lab.