Day 0 – SIPA – 2022
Another summer is here and so is the Summer Internship Program. We started this internship program way back in 2015 and the idea was to give exposure to students so that they can equip themselves with the requisite industry skills particularly the ones relevant to web dev as it allows them to help startups with improving their online footprints and also explore freelancing if interested in it.
Generally we get internship requests from IIIT Nuzvid students but this year we got students from Adikavi Nannaya University. Apparently Farooq (The nice guy who had taken the selfie below) had reached out to 140+ odd companies requesting for internship and I had to take a chance on them seeing his perseverance.
Our long term plan is to make this internship program available to as many students as possible across Andhra Pradesh. The major constraint is availability of free/low cost space as the internship is free (and open to All) for students and I hope more colleges and coworking spaces will come forward to help in this initiative. Thanks to iKushal we got 10 seats allocated for one of the batch of students but we needed more and got timely help from AU.
We are grateful to Ravi Eswarapu, CEO of AU Incubation Hub who agreed to arrange bigger space to accommodate full batch of 30-40 students and got the meeting with AU VC, Prof. P.V.G.D. Prasad Reddy Garu and Prof. V. Krishna Mohan Garu who patiently listened to the summer internship idea and gave a green signal. Armed with this and with reference from Dean of R&D, Prof. K. Basavaiah we met the Head of Department of Chemistry, Dr. P. Shyamala who assured us full support and graciously agreed to let the seminar hall be used for it.
Now that the space was allocated, we started the work. We had our 1st meeting today on 01 June 2022, and we explained the history behind the Vizag Startups community and why we are doing this summer internship program. The broad contour of the program was explained to the students. Attached here is the proposal letter we gave to AU for the same.
I hope once the students goes through the 7 days self driven bootcamp, they would be able to build small projects like simple landing pages or a website, scrape data and sending cold emails etc. which are required by almost all the companies.
Glad to be finally back in action and taking this march forward to see a vibrant startup ecosystem here. Will keep updating this space regularly so that people can follow this experiment.