Campus Life

Psychology student dedicated to HackPSU, bringing equality to tech industry

Penn State psychology major Lydia Huang works on gaining new HackPSU sponsorship at local co-working hub New Leaf Initiative. Credit: Yixuan LiAll Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Before the second semester of her junior year, Lydia Huang, a psychology major from Palo Alto, California, had never written a single line of code.

One year later, Huang has successfully built a website by herself for Support with Love, a foundation she started that is dedicated to creating a community of support and education for Asian Americans dealing with stigmas of mental health, suicide and suicide prevention.

Serving as one of the directors for the upcoming HackPSU on March 28-29, a 24-hour hackathon co-hosted by the Penn State World Campus and Innoblue, Huang stays determined to make a great event even greater, aiming to educate students from all disciplines, genders and backgrounds and with different levels of coding knowledge.

“A hackathon is where everything is possible in just 24 hours,” Huang explains, and she should know. Huang attended HackPSU, her first hackathon, in 2014, and it opened a new door for her. She has since attended several hackathons independently or with other organizers of HackPSU across the country, including Hackcon, Mhacks IV, Pennapps and VT Hacks.

HackPSU: What’s in it for students

“HackPSU offers workshops to students of all levels,” Huang said. “Even if you’ve never seen a single line of code in your life, we have something for you.”

Students will be able to work on any kinds of projects including applications, hardware, websites and many more. With no projects allowed to start before the hack, it is a fair game for everyone.

“I had some of my best memories in college through hackathons,” Huang said. “You are able to meet with a lot of inspiring people and innovative companies in the fields. It’s a great opportunity for you to expand your network.”

Attending hackathons has shaped Huang’s future career goals in the field of technology. She has thought about being a professional hackathon organizer after graduation that would allow her to tour around major universities across the United States, and be a part of the inspiration for generations of college students.

New opportunities through hackathons

One thing Huang has noticed from her own experience is the lack of female hackers and hackers from fields other than computer science in the hackathons she’s been to. And that’s what motivates her in the first place — wanting to break the stereotypes many people have about and in the tech industry.

“People look at me and they might think, you are a psychology major, what are you doing here. But in reality, technology is a field that is deeply connected with all industries,” she said. “Say you are a biology major, and you want to build an app to educate people about different parts of our body. That’s where comes the importance of knowing how to code.

“No matter what your major is — business, liberal arts, science — there is an advantage of learning to code,” she added. “Why hire someone else if you know how to do it yourself?”

Support with Love, through trial and coding

Huang remembers that when she first started building her website, she stayed up until 4 a.m. one night.

“There was something wrong with the domain I bought. So I had to rebuild everything,” she said. “And all I was thinking was, ‘I have to keep going.’ ”

Eventually she was able to fix everything. And a great feeling of achievement came to her when she was able to see her own website up and running.

Since surviving her best friend’s suicide in high school, Huang has been passionate about issues related with mental health, depression and suicide prevention. When she took her first entrepreneurship class during her junior year and had to write a business feasibility report, she first discovered the stigma toward mental health in Asian culture through research. From there, the idea for Support with Love came to mind.

“I found that due to the negative cultural perception in many traditional Asian cultures, topics such as suicide and depression are considered taboo as they garner a sense of dishonor for the family, which is why Asian Americans are least likely to seek professional help when it comes to mental illness,” Huang said.

After her idea won first place in the education category of the 1000 Pitches Penn State competition — the local version of the world’s largest student idea pitch competition — Huang was able to further develop Support with Love with the help of Innoblue’s Startup Accelerator later in spring 2014. Startup Accelerator is an eight-week program with workshops and mentorship that helps transform startup ideas into reality.

The following summer, after directly contacting a professor she knew back home, she was able to get funding and support from Stanford University to do more research on her project and create new suicide prevention programs.

“It all started from one idea,” Huang said. “If you have an idea, a hackathon provides the perfect opportunity to make it happen.”

Last Updated March 25, 2015