Nurture curiosity

Written on October 06, 2020

2 min. read

For Engineering students to become capable enough for the product-companies to happily onboard them into their engineering team. We need to nurture the students’ curiosity, starting in the first year itself.

The first 120 days becomes crucial. The people who desire to build software and products are the one who puts maximum effort to create software. In the process, they learn the skills needed for product companies. We need to target these people who are willing to put their best to build software.

We need to nurture their curiosity with exciting projects as part of the introductory programming course. To train students in second and third years for Amazon and Google like companies, we need to sow the seeds in the first semester. In the way of giving them exciting projects.

Whatever they are interested in, we must make them develop some exciting applications in that area, which requires medium effort.

This is an opportunity window we have. We need to make decisions quickly regarding this. What Engineering colleges can do?

End goal:

Make the B.Tech 2020 batch students (currently first year) ready for FAANG companies. As part of this, we can make them do 2 projects by a minimum of 40% of the students.

Execution:

For this, I will use all of my industry experience in making them capable developers. I will guide the students through the faculty members only.

Periodically, I will bring (since these are online classes) developers from Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other product-companies to answer students’ questions. These sessions will clear some of the students’ misconceptions and make them put their efforts in the right direction to achieve their dreams.

The faculty members who are teaching first-year students will identify 20 students from the second-year, who are good and interested in programming. These senior students will act as mentors for first-year students.

We can give optional practice questions to the first-year students and those who solves these questions we could guide them to the next level. As more and more students in the class become comfortable in coding, the students in the class will have many people to reach out for help and guidance in understanding the subject. In the process, the whole students in the class become better at coding.

We will also showcase students some of the best projects they could do using the cutting edge technology available today. With the convenience of the latest industry developer tools, students would step into the world software developers’ ecosystem.

One of the program’s outputs would be to showcase the exciting projects done by the first and second-year students.