Staying Calm within the Chaos
Weeks 2–6 were a blur, mainly because of the lack of sleep
So remember how we were supposed to spend the entirety of Saturday and Sunday just thinking?
Well, it turns out, spending the whole of your time just particularly thinking, is actually quite hard.
On top of that, Eric and Alan also dropped another bomb on the poor unsuspecting souls that we were — our final teams would have to be ready by Monday as well.
Magically coming up with one single problem and a tentative solution to it was hard enough without having to network among 19 strangers and decide who to select as your group partner.
If you’ve ever worked in a group project before, you’ll know that choosing your teammates and your project brief are the 2 hardest things to do.
And we had 2 days 🙂
After a lot of browsing on the internet, stalking old projects and frustrated naps- I finally had a couple of ideas which we could go along.
So come Monday, each of us went up in front of the lab and shares with the class what their idea was. Following which, we had to pair up in teams based on whose idea we liked/wanted to work on.
After initial confusion, I got paired with my friend Agrata last minute and both of us had 0 clues about what we wanted to work on. Somehow after flailing around like a fish out of the ocean, we finally narrowed down into a problem and a possible solution for it.
We had to prepare a pitch to be made in 7minutes in front of the whole lab on Friday — The 6–7 best ones would get approved based on voting and 3–4 teams would have to rethink their pitch. Either by changing the pitch or by changing their product.
This was to make sure the competition was fair among all 10 teams ie. all 10 teams have solid ideas which pit well against each other.
Our team made it through Friday. And now that we had passed the initial test of our idea, we had to work on perfecting it and building a working prototype for it in the coming weeks.
Each team was assigned a budget of Rs. 50,000 for any materials, traveling and products they would require. We had a huge arsenal of microcontrollers and mechanical tools by our side, along with 2/3 3D printers and a laser cutter. However, if these didn’t suffice for a particular project, we could order parts from Amazon or go shopping for stuff in Ahmedabad.
About halfway into week 2, we already had all the parts which we needed for building the first iteration of our product and I thoroughly enjoyed applying the same process of research, build and iterate I have used for digital products for something tangible.
As each team was preparing their working prototype, we had guest evaluations every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays in groups of 5 teams each. Until week 7 that is, but we’ll get to that in a bit. First, a little about guest evaluations.
Every week there would be a panel of distinguished individuals from different walks of life who we would have to give a timed presentation to. The people ranged from Doctors, Professors of Management and Design (it helped that IIM -A and NID -A were both nearby), Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists… You get the idea.
We would also have a QnA round after our presentation and they were always advised to be BRUTAL by Eric and Alan. The more critical their feedback, the more flaws we found in our product early on.
It was also common to find an expert in the field of your product among the panel of 6–7 guest evaluators. After the pitching was done, we would often engage with them 1:1 in discussion and they sometimes even helped with solving a problem a team would be struggling with.
In fact, it was one such guest evaluator who gave sent a material which ended up being core to the product and solved a problem we were stuck with since weeks!
The whole evaluation session is recorded and Alan and Eric go over the whole video frame by frame the next day along with the teams. We get feedback from them on our presentation soft skills like- pauses/clarity and on the actual presentation itself- font too small/low contrast in the images.
There was a running joke, that if Alan and Eric were to be phrased, Alan would be “Take a Pause” and Eric would be “Slow Down”. Heck, Eric even had a slow down t-shirt he would wear on the days of our presentations! 😆
Watching yourself present on video is a whole different ball game altogether. You never know you have so many misconceptions about the way you speak. I considered myself to be an average orator, but man was I wrong! I Spoke too fast, mumbled a couple of times, had a slacking posture… Safe to say, I wasn’t half of the orator I thought I was 😅.
While we were shopping for parts, building our prototype and giving presentations — There was one thing which we parallelly kept doing. Learning patent law.
All 20 of us in the program had absolutely no idea about patent law and the idea that in a few weeks we’ll be writing one and filing for a provisional patent was something we just could not see happening.
Alan (being a patent lawyer) would take 1-hour lectures on patent law 2–3 times every week. Surprisingly (for me at least), it turned out to be a really interesting and cool topic to learn about.
Once we covered the basics, we moved on to more specific stuff about how we’ll be drafting our patents and also how we have to make sure our product is patentable.
This was pretty much it for the first 6 weeks. But none of it was ever boring, every week would yield something new — a prior art reference that was missed and now we need to innovate the design of the product. Shopping for new stuff from the beautiful Ahmedabad market (all costs covered 😎).
Another thing that kept the drive alive in us even after such a hectic regime was the fact that we were building an actual working product which is solving a real problem. Something that has not been addressed by anyone yet and can potentially impact millions of people’s lives.
Alan and Eric were very particular about working in the lab and having nothing to distract us. Not even food. We took a break once for lunch every day and would be expected to reach the lab by 10 am and not leave before 5 pm.
We had a toaster, fridge and a microwave and could order whatever food we want through Big Basket (a food delivery service). It wouldn’t be uncommon to see huge crates of chips, cola, biscuits, chocolates, ice-cream etc show up at the gate of the lab.
Other than having a completely stalked fridge at all times, we also took random breaks to do various activities — play paintball, have a pizza party, ballon Olympics (silly balloon games which everyone played with competitive passion 😛 since there was a prize of Rs.2000 on the line)
All of this till the end of Week 6.
We had a final Gala dinner on a Saturday before the last week began and then went on to the final week.
More on the last stretch in the next and final part.
