Talent is being wasted in India. Here’s how we are changing that.
🚀 Your college doesn’t have to define your career.
“I dropped out of college after my 1st semester — failed expectations. Reanswered entrance exams, nothing changed. I got back into the same college. My grades are low, but I love doing projects.”
— Nilay Savant, now graduated (Padre Conceição College of Engineering, Goa)
You could change the name and the college in the sentiment above and parts of it would still ring true for millions of Indians. We all know of a handful of students who deserve better than the college that they get allotted 😟
I’m going to let you in on a hack that we’ve come up with to fix this, read on👇🏽
😡 Injustice.
The first time I came across Nilay was at the start of his final semester of engineering college. He’d been to the International Robotics Challenge, where he single handedly built an autonomous bot which had to solve a maze, identify positions of blocks and lift them around to complete the task.
With exams testing for your ability to regurgitate notes or solve theoretical problems, it’s no surprise that students land up in random colleges and fumble academically, being forced to pick up outdated skillsets. Nilay’s fate was no different. To add to his misfortune, it is frustrating how isolated a dedicated techie can feel in a college, because almost no one wants to discuss or build projects for the joy of doing so.
To rub it in, the internship or job opportunities available in most colleges aren’t exactly worth boasting about. Mass recruiting firms which form the bulk of opportunities treat students like commodities — no one is different from the other. Tech support jobs like the one Nilay had in hand may land a steady job for many, but vastly undermine what a talented individual is capable of.
How do we come together to fight back and give students who are committed to learning, the ones hungry for more what they deserve?
🤔 TBH, what makes the top institutes ‘good’?
Though the top tier institutes in the country have their fair share of flaws, let us pick up lessons on what they have got working for them.
👉🏽 Quality of Student Body
The curated student body matters more than the faculty or infrastructure. After all, you’re the average of the five people spend the most time with.
👉🏽 Helpful Alumni Networks
Students and alumni actively guide each other discover opportunites rather than pulling each other down. This is how a brand is built over time.
👉🏽 Trust, Flexibility and Freedom
No attendance compulsion, exams where you can bring in your textbooks and notes, choose from a wide array of electives..these small things ensure that students are treated like adults that they are.
The number of sharp people exceed the number of seats in the top institutes. How do we bring the benefits of these institutes to all?
🔥 The Experiment
Armed with these insights, an understanding of the online learning landscape as well as knowledge of what the industry wished to hire for, we set out to help students like Nilay land opportunities that’ll bring the best out of him.
In Dec ’18, we went about Goan engineering colleges, bringing the best of talent across years and streams under one umbrella — Nova Semita (the new path). The idea was to train these exceptional minds in cutting edge technologies and skills (such as ReactJS, NodeJS, UI/UX) to augment their existing learnings in electronics, machine learning, robotics and entrepreneurship. We were supported by mentors from top companies such as Amazon, Swiggy, Facebook to design our industry driven curriculum. Not to forget, we went through this as friends rather than as students and teachers.
4 intense months of learning online, building projects in teams, interning at early stage startups led us to a ton of learnings. We’d successfully set up an online community-platform of incredibly smart individuals who eat, breathe and sleep tech. Our helpfulness and the ability to give back to the community is a key element of who we are. This ties in to our promise to be extremely student friendly — letting people learn on their own time, and answering doubts no matter what the hour.
Win 🎉
It didn’t surprise us when Nilay along with Luis Gomes and Dave Paiva bagged full stack developer positions at startups (Locale.ai and stealth mode startups in Sports Broadcasting and IoT) which pay them 2x of the jobs they had landed for campus placements! Niket Kamat Satoskar had already done UI/UX designs for multiple startups and is currently working on design for a US based fintech startup. And these are just the final year students from the early batch!
🚀 The Game Begins
We’re a team of graduates from BITS Pilani, Goa Engineering College and London School of Economics with a burning passion to give students the experience that they deserve. Having worked in education, tech startups as well as run multi-million dollar companies, we’re now out to build India’s largest online campus-community of students who seek to grow, to kickstart their career in tech. We’ve got results to show. Now, you can join in. The game-changer is here.
Nova Semita’s Fellowship Is Here!
We’re taking the best features of the top institutes and bundling them together for the internet enabled era. Your grades, your college pedigree doesn’t matter to us as long as you are oozing with ambition and the ability to pick up things fast. We’re here to believe in you and help you stand out.
Our online fellowship is open to students in the 3rd & 4th year of engineering. We’re currently offering the following tracks.
Each fellow is slated to work in a group while being guided and pushed by their personal success executive as well as an experienced tech facilitator. The students are expected to work on the fellowship in parallel to college.
Here’s the least of what our fellows will get :
- Know what to learn, from where and how.
- Push for building projects that’ll actually be used by people.
- Rock solid community of like minded folks.
- Access to curated content from the top instructors in the world.
- Getting one’s technical doubts solved.
- Support with building your personal brand.
- AMAs and connects to engineers in top global firms.
- Support for entrepreneurial activities.
💼 To top it all up, we are collaborating with our network of stellar companies and startups across India, US and Canada where our fellows will be placed upon completion of the fellowship.
Oh, and did I mention that you don’t have to pay anything for the fellowship while in college? For our contribution in your success, we expect 12% of your income over 3 years once you begin earning over INR 5LPA. If you do not get there, you are not obliged to pay us anything. This is how we ensure that our success lies in making you successful and pushing you higher.
Check out more details here👇🏽
You can apply to the fellowship here 👇🏽
