These 3 turning points helped me get a campus job at SAP Labs

An engineer is someone who designs, builds and maintains machines, systems etc. An engineer is someone who solves the problems in the world using the tools at his disposal.

There were three turning points in my life which are well connected.

College life gives you many opportunities and moments to think about your career and act upon it. Many students have blinders and don’t see them coming.

1) Here is my FIRST turning point in life

I was once asked in an interview “What have you ‘engineered’ during your engineering college days?” This question made me reflect on my last 3 years of college life. I was in my final year and for a moment I felt “What am I doing in life?”This question pesters every student for once in their college life and especially in the final year.

Here is how I retrospected

a) What 3 skills do I have which has demand in the market?

b) As a computer science engineer, what have I built to showcase my efforts?

c) Do I know what I should do in the next 3 years of my life?

The answer to all three questions were NO, NO and NO.

I felt the need of appropriately structured mechanisms to impart skills which will give India’s engineering graduates like me more Knowledge, Skills and Opportunities.

2) Here comes my SECOND Turning Point that shaped my college life

SV.CO came to me at that point of my life when I was looking for answers. Probably this is what is called as Serendipity. This was the time I had to find answers to all my questions and SV.CO helped me explore.

Formation of Team

I was not very sure if this was something I could do. I was not confident enough to take the leap. Since it had to be a team that should apply, I asked some friends of mine if they would be interested. But none of them were. So I dropped the idea. Then one fine day, I got a call from a guy in college who said he was forming a team and was looking for developers. He had on board one of my friends with whom I had done a lot of projects. So I decided to join the team.

Thus Team Zykos was born.

It just got exciting from there on

You are in class in India in the morning. At night, you have another class from a person sitting half way across the globe in Palo Alto. That is SV.CO.

People like Girish Mathrubhootam, founder of Million Dollar startup Freshdesk, taking time off his busy schedule to talk to us for an hour. What else can we ask for. We can also clear our doubts with the speaker after the talk.

The three things which changed my lifestyle as a student

a) Slack Channel: The slack channel where we have the community of budding entrepreneurs. We have people working on insanely cool stuff here. People who are ready to share knowledge, help others no matter what.

b) SV.CO Events: For our batch, there were two collective events that we attended, Alpha Launch Day at Fresh desk Chennai and Customer Insight Day at 24/7 Ltd Bengaluru. They are sort of like the mid term exams in the program. Only difference being that no one fails. Everyone keeps learning.

We Won the first prize at Alpha launch for the best pitch. I didn’t know this moment would change my life later which I have explained at the end.

c) SV.CO Dashboard was our new Facebook: There are a lot of tasks to be completed by the team as part of the program. The tasks that have been completed, and the ones not completed are shown in the dashboard. We get an awareness of how we should move forward by just looking at our dashboard.

I have improved a lot and thanks to this program. I am more aware about things related to startups, engineering, business etc. I listen to talks by eminent engineers more carefully than before. I always think of ways in which a project can be brought to the market as a product.

Did we succeed? Yes and No

Every startup has three engines

a) Product b) User c) Money

· Product engine gives you skill sets and mindset by building a product like an app or software.

· User engine is how you get users for your product

· Money engine is how startups make money by making users pay for your product.

We failed to build the User engine. But we tried our 100% to build a product engine. We gained the best skills which industry wanted and would have never gained without ‘engineering’ a product.

Here comes my THIRD turning point in career

SAP Labs visited our college a few days ago for placements. After an aptitude round and 4 rounds of interview, I was selected. The rounds were

1) Aptitude and coding round

2) Technical interview 1

3) Technical interview 2

4) Managerial interview

5) HR interview

Each of these was an elimination round

Most questions were asked from Database and data structures, C++ programming. Runtime polymorphism, SDLC, Blackbox and whitebox testing, ACID properties etc.

This is what every smart developer would pull off. You need an edge case to be selected. My previous two turning points was my story for that day.

6 months experience at SV really helped me in interacting with interviewers and conveying my ideas and thoughts with CLARITY.

Two things that helped me have an edge

a) The discussions in various slack channels helped me up my technical knowledge so that I was able to impress the panel with my knowledge about startups.

b) The prize won at alpha launch by our team at the alpha launch was written on my resume. I spoke at length about the event, the pitch competition and the exposure we got during the alpha launch day and the customer insight day. The HR team was impressed.

I was hired with a good pay which I never imagined while joining engineering.

Decoding the myth of campus startups

A doubt that can come up is when SV tells us that engineering students in India needs to evolve, why do they promote students to build campus startups? A six month program? Most of the students land up with jobs at the end.

Well it is not that you are going to build a world class startup within 6 months. The program helps you get the basics of building a good startup in six months. It shows you how you can do things. Then the onus is on you whether you build a good startup or not. And you can take any amount of time you want.

Few of my friends at SV.CO are building startups even after college. Few have landed up with jobs. But all have a startup mindset today.

I am an explorer at heart. Are you ?