How students in India are learning engineering by building real products while in college #StartinCollege
Drowsy classes?
Late submission?
11th-hour rush??
Commentating the whole world??
Is that all?
I will share my story with SV.CO and how it turned my life into an eventful and memorable one.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Felix Josemon, currently in the fifth semester of Computer Science and Engineering in Government Engineering College, Thrissur. I would like to define myself as a mixture of Hacker and Hustler. We(my team and i)happened to get into SV.CO’s first batch, where students were given the opportunity to become first -time founders of startups while in college itself.
The first batch’s invitation was open while we were in the second year of college. The batch was only open to Third and Fourth-year students. Anyway with the opportunity to learn, build a startup and get the ‘startup box’ given to every team who reached the final stage, we decided to give it a try. Forming a team was not difficult for us because three months before we had an entrepreneurship workshop conducted by IEDC and Open fuel, in which we all had participated. I initiated forming a team(a team of Hackers and Hustlers) where everyone was comfortable and were ready to build the next step towards their career.
Teams were shortlisted to 34 after the technical round and by the grace of god, we were able to clear at the last minute. The next round was a pretty serious one in which the whole team was called for an interview(unlike one-on-one ). Having no interview experience before(we just started our second Year!), we decided to appear for the interview at Startup Village, Kochi. We were surprised to see the whole 34 batches, all in pre-final and final years in college across Kerala. We decided to be ourselves for the interview. You probably won’t believe what happened next. WE GOT QUALIFIED FOR THE FIRST BATCH OF STARTUPBOX PROGRAMME AND WAS IN THE THIRD PLACE AFTER THIS FINAL ROUND. Skipping some parts as it may get boring to you readers. (One of 20 other Teams, Youngest team, Team members all my classmates, Awarded by Chief Minister of Kerala with startup box to ‘work on our product’ with for 6 months at Trivandrum Secretariat)
“Work on our product”
Did we had a product Idea? Absolutely NO. We were given a choice to either pick among one of the 40 proven ideas in the FINTECH sector or come up with an idea on our own.
Kickstarting our 6 Months Journey!
A team which unitedly work with a single vision(goal) for better tomorrow is how I would like to define a ‘Startup’.
Our journey begins after signing a partnership agreement with Startup Village(SV.CO).
Fast Forward.
As the word “Digital Incubation” says, our interactions were completely in Public Slack of SV.CO. We had weekly townhalls(online conversations with the entire batch) which sums up events of past and assigns future targets for teams and team members. As we all know, there is a fame for “LAST MINUTE” syndrome where we engineering students always procrastinate everything till last minute. Whereas in here deadlines were serious and had severe consequences. We were able to cultivate more punctual habits by the end of this programme.
We completed our first version of prototype which we showed it to real customers. This is the scenario that exceptionally differs between a college project and a college startup. I have seen my seniors who just for the sake of completing the curriculum, appearing with Mini-Projects in third year just to show authorities for marks.
We flunked many of our classes(were able to convince authorities for attendance through SEP[Student Entrepreneurship Policy]which supplied attendance and grace marks necessary)and stayed at friend’s house to complete targets. I still remember that five-day long stay at Adharsh’s(our CDO) House with Abdul Haleem(our CTO).
Truth be told we failed so many times to figure out lines of code. Remember we were just in the second year of college and had the only experience printing "HELLO WORLD" on screen in Java. Well, that didn't stop our journey. We took days and nights to complete our prototype. This is such an experience we may not be able to come across if we had not enrolled in this program.
The simultaneous task with prototyping was building up a product deck. We had no idea what on Earth a product deck was! Having the only experience of submitting countless numbers of assignments and project reports which eventually ended up in someone’s trash(not re-cyclebin), we browsed for long hours reviewing product decks of other startups. Deck is a living document which a team uses while pitching(this term was also new!). Unlike anything, this needs to be constantly updated. We were able to make a 10 paged deck with which we pitched before ICICI bank and the investors at the event ‘YES-CAN 2015’.
Prototype building is only half the journey, pitching is another half. We received feedback and suggestions after we pitched, which we were able to improve.We could also reach out to mentors at SV.CO using faculty connect with the click of a button and arrange Hangout sessions.
In short, with the Hangout sessions and support given by SV.CO, we were able to build our own startup while in the second year of engineering.
Dear reader, if you are that one crazy kid who has got a burning desire to build something on your own while in college(yeah #startincollege), and make a real impact on the world, sv.co/apply is your perfect cup of tea. SV.CO has vastly improved its program for the second batch.
Better and more deadlines, excellent faculties, alumnus and much more. These guys keep on improving the programme by taking suggestions from anyone.
Believe me, it’s going to entirely change the way you think and act which ultimately decides who you become.
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