Hertz has long been a driving force in the rental-vehicle industry, and now Southwest Florida’s newest corporate neighbor is helping Florida Gulf Coast University’s software-engineering students drive the innovations of tomorrow.
In Southwest Florida — where on Jan. 22 Hertz officially christened its new company headquarters in Estero, just minutes south of the FGCU campus — that pathway is the Hertz-FGCU Hackathon. That’s where about 50 students, all from FGCU’s software engineering program except for a few specially invited whiz kids from nearby Dunbar High School and Southern Technical College, spent all day and night Jan. 23 and most of Jan. 24 in the Cohen Center ballroom hacking their way through real-life tech challenges posed by Hertz representatives.
Fueled by love of software engineering and growing knowledge of it, along with who-knows-how-many energy drinks to power through the all-night battle of brains, these students teamed up in small groups to tackle problems in two categories: data analytics and program challenges. The goal? Victory as determined by software experts who served as judges… not to mention rather cool prizes such as iWatches and flat-screen TVs.
“A few students brought sleeping bags, but most just stayed up and worked through the night,” said Dr. Dahai Guo, chair and associate professor of software engineering in the U.A. Whitaker College of Engineering.
Guo helped coordinate the event with Hertz’s Greg Palk, director of customer relationship management applications, and two other primary corporate sponsors, IBM and Brierley+Partners. Salesforce and Best Buy also kicked in help, along with the businesses that delivered brain food: Moe’s Southwest Grill, Five Guys and Tijuana Flats.
In its second year, Hackathon produces mutual benefits for Hertz and the university. Hertz gets to sort through a variety of potential solutions and improvements to technical situations posed to the competing teams of students while scouting future software-engineering talent. In turn, FGCU’s engineers of tomorrow get the focused attention of Hertz recruiters to show off their software stuff far beyond the usual meet-and-greet resume exchanges at job fairs.
Take the case of a member of the winning team from the inaugural 2015 Hackathon, Brent Oliver, who graduated from FGCU last year with a degree in software engineering and is now a Java developer with Hertz Equipment Rental. “He had a job with Hertz even before he graduated,” Guo said. “Hertz also hired several other attendants as interns in the summer of 2015.”
Also take the case of FGCU junior software engineering major Andrew Owen, who likely got his foot in the Hertz door when he nailed the “Flash Trivia Challenge,” a Hackathon sub event, at this year’s competition. “He impressed Hertz’s chief information security officer (Pete Nicoletti) so much he may well be recruited for an internship or full-time employment,” Guo said.
Owen, meanwhile, was impressed by “all the things that came up that I didn’t know,” almost downplaying his trivial pursuit. “I knew about half of what came up, as I remember it.”
One also might want to watch the budding careers of FGCU senior software engineering students Eric Lindsey, Bobby Hughes, Nick Festa and Andrew Davis, whose group data analysis of the impact of weather on vehicle rentals netted all four shiny new iWatches and flat-screen TVs at this year’s Hackathon.
Also trending up are future prospects for the team of Reza Ansary, David Seager and Justin Gosselin, who won the programming challenge by developing a mobile app to streamline car selection on the fly. These three senior software engineering majors also are chilling in front of new 40-inch flat screens after their winning Hackathon performance — not to mention the intangible reward of triumph through teamwork.
“This forces students to learn something new,” Ansary said. In his team’s case, he noted that the programming problem required them to “learn how to implement text-messaging functionality for that particular challenge, which we did not think of before.
“The event requires every team to use their skill sets and problem-solving skills, to establish group work and maintain discipline and patience,” Ansary said. “This has happened because of our teamwork … our team had great chemistry. We helped each other out. We were united.”
As a side note, for a sneak preview of coming software-engineering attractions, consider that Dunbar High’s team finished second in data analytics after placing third last year. “We get a lot of their students here at FGCU after they finish high school,” Guo said.
In other words, here comes the next wave of student drivers in the fast lane of software technology.