10 Days of something different
In June ’16, P@SHA (Pakistan Software Houses Association) for the first time hosted a summer boot camp for teenagers at their incubation space on top of Naheed store. P@SHA invited a number of kids from the ages thirteen to nineteen to their office to take part in their boot camp. All of us had been selected on the basis of what we had written in our applications and the mixture of ages and genders. No one felt uneasy, being too young or too old.
The summer boot camp started on the 13th of June and ended on the 24th of June. It included a serious of guest speakers and activities which were aimed at helping us understand what we would go through when starting up our own businesses or managing a business in the future. It also helped us learn skills that we would need, such as thinking on our feet, managing cost, calculating profit, using design, etc.
We attended the camp Monday to Friday from eleven and two, with the exception of Friday when the timings were ten to one in order to allow us time to go and prepare ourselves for Friday prayers. Many of the summer nestlings (the term that was fondly bestowed upon anyone who becomes part of the Nest I/O) were of different backgrounds. Some of us were part of the Inter and Matric system, while others were doing their O and A levels. There were also those with backgrounds in computer science or in chemistry, while others had backgrounds in economics or in biology.
The camp was divided into two week long sessions.
The first session was held in the first week and consisted of an ice breaking session, a guest speaker and four workshops. The first day (i.e. Monday) was the ice breaking session where we were randomly divided into five teams of four members each. We were then given a checklist to complete which included a scavenger hunt and certain otherwise daunting tasks. These tasks included singing baba black sheep in front of the entrance of the supermarket, and finding a duck to take a picture with. The second day was a brain games workshop held by a start-up called as TEDDICT. They were former nestlings (the term used to describe incubatees at the NEST I/O) from the first batch and had come to conduct the workshop. After the workshop rumaisa mughal, the leader of the boot camp, performed a needs finding workshop in order to help us understand how to identify and solve problems. The third day brought us a guest speaker in the form of Adil Moosajee. He is a successful entrepreneur and one of the owners of the restaurant East End, as well as the owner of the designer fashion chain Ego. After an hour and a half explaining key steps to success and some of his own experiences, we also had a chance to be taught how to build our own websites thanks to Sameer Ahmed Khan, a former nestling and currently teaching at Karachi University as part of the visiting staff.
The fourth day things took a pleasant turn with an unsuspecting surprise. We were going to be participating in an improv workshop with in-house improv artists Sana Khan Niazi and Junaid Malik, also known as JD. Both former nestlings themselves they stick around to help around at the Nest and work on their individual start-ups. The fifth day was also interesting as we were exposed to something new in the form of Scratch. Scratch is platform used to help understand the concept of coding better and was conducted by TEDDICT once again.
Understandably after such exciting experiences the weekend seemed to be dull for most of the summer nestlings. We were full of excitement when we came back on Monday wondering what else could possibly be in store for us. And we were not disappointed. There were two lecture/ workshops on Monday for us. The first was about circuits and the concept of it in engineering and building by EjaadTech. We were also given small sets to experiment and create circuits with and the best six and seven were given prizes. We were then shown how the circuits we built could be used to construct our very own aviation drone. Following this workshop Techtree (one of the start-ups currently incubated) spoke to us about robotics and showed us different robots that they had constructed by themselves without using tools such as Lego mind storm and allowed us to control them.
The next day The Nest’s in house designers, Tajwar Aziz and Alyna Butt, each gave a presentation related to design and advertisements where they spoke about colour combinations and the rule of thirds. They also exposed us to a site known as canva.com and helped us understand the techniques and tips to making good designs. We first played around with the site for a while before they asked us to create our own business cards using the site. Then on day eight of the boot camp we divided ourselves into teams and Rumaisa told us that we were going to have to act as a company and make greeting cards to sell to the incubated nestlings in the Nest. We were going to have to appoint a business and operations manager, a finance manager, a product manager and a marketing and sales manager. This turned out to be an interesting experience to all of us and we had a lot of fun.
For our second last day we sat down with start-ups Paimona and Sukoon and heard their stories and experiences of how they first decided to start-up their respective businesses and what problems they were facing now that they were running their own start-ups. This session lasted for an hour and a half before Paimona and Sukoon took off and we sat down to discuss our pitches with Rumaisa and Akash, as our last day was scheduled to be the day where we pitched our hypothetical start-ups to the Nest as the culmination of our time there. The following day before we started our pitched we had a small talk with Jawwad Farid. A mentor for those at the Nest and outside. He spoke to us about some rules that we should explore to lead our lives as professionals. He explained the the true meaning of wealth is the amount of control one has over one’s life versus cash in the bank. After that and the pitches we received our certificates and special Nest I/O shirts and took a picture with the team. It was an amazing experience overall but it lasted too short a while.
If you want to know more details you should sign up for the next summer nestling batch which is starting soon ;).
Small Edit: Thank you Jehan Ara, rumaisa mughal, Sukena Rizvi, Alyna Butt, and the rest of the Nest I/O team for making this such an amazing experience for us and starting something that has never before been our city. Good luck with the future batch!!!
