The Claude Builder Club at ASU has developed into a monumental space for the University’s coders through its high-profile sponsorships and desire to provide students with more job opportunities. 

The club was founded this semester and works closely with Anthropic, the creators of Claude AI, to bring the program to ASU.

With these partnerships, the club hosted its first hackathon over the weekend, bringing together students from various backgrounds for a night of coding. These students focused on projects based in “education or social good and development tools,” President Shiven Shekar, a senior studying computer science, said.

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The Claude Builder Club may be new to campus, but by no means is it a small club. The leadership team of 13 students and their adviser, Punya Mishra, a professor at the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, gathered about 400 sign-ups of undergraduate and master’s students for the hackathon.

“We were able to grow so exponentially because of our resources we were set with from being, of course, sponsored by Claude,” Anjali Kok, senior studying computer science and vice president of the club, said. 

Shekar said the club was founded with one main intention: to improve how the University is seen in the tech sector. He also said he thinks the University’s “brand” leads to technology companies declining to hire graduates, so he wanted to “fix that image.” 

“We try to do technical projects and promote it a lot on social media and get more affiliations with big tech,” Shekar said. “In the long term, ASU will be on the same standing for job considerations and the tech and engineering world as other schools.”

A hackathon is not only time-consuming to participate in, but the planning and organization of the event usually must be done months in advance, at the very least, to plan with sponsors. However, the team was able to do all of the work for the hackathon in just a little more than a month. 

The club was able to get sponsorships from Anthropic, ether.fi, Polymarket, Red Bull, Acorns and Base. The sponsorships came down to having the right contacts, Alex Foster, a junior studying computer science, said.

“Part of the issue is you don’t know who to reach out to directly,” Foster said. “When you go to a website, they’re not going to have anything saying ’email this person,’ and so you have to rely on your existing networks.”

To gain student interest in participation, the club leaned on its partnership with Anthropic, Kok said.

“We are sponsored by such a big corporation that we were able to really entice people with things such as our free Claude Pro,” Kok said. 

Moving forward, the club will continue to create large events like the hackathon to further its impact at the University. Sticking to the theme of innovation, the club plans to give students a space to work on projects they are passionate about. 

As of now, the club plans to have more workshops and hackathons, reinforced by its Anthropic sponsorship. It will also host a space where people can learn more and get involved in its projects. 

The club has a special products division as well, which creates and works on difficult tasks. Shekar said the projects are sent to production so various companies can see them, and students involved in them can get recognition for the work they did. 

The Claude Builder Club has focused on helping University students with jobs from the start. With its planning and events, it’s picking up speed while company sponsorships help accomplish its goals, Shekar said. 

“We’re an organization here dedicated to improving the brand name of our University through extremely hard technical projects and amazing ones done at hackathons like these,” Shekar said.

Edited by Kate Gore, George Headley and Ellis Preston.

Reach the reporter at myerrag1@asu.edu.

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Meghana Yerragovula is a reporter for the state press. She is on her second semester writing as a reporter.

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