‘Student scores 45 lakh on campus placement’. How often do you get this news? While many are getting huge job offers, there are few students who set out to be entrepreneurs. And in the city of coaching centres, a rare workshop is being held where students are being encouraged to start on their own.
The scenario in Room No. 117 in the Computer Science Department of JNTU is very different. Students are huddled around HYSEA (Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association) president Ramesh Loganathan (who’s seated on a table), pitching their ideas. They are being shot down, cross-questioned but the students don’t give up. A banner behind the table lets you know what’s going on.
In a first-of-its-kind initiative, HYSEA, in collaboration with JNTU and TASK (Telangana Academy of Skill and Knowledge), is holding a five-week workshop named Excite, to inculcate entrepreneurship. Seventy-eight teams from 25 colleges have come together for the event.
Just five days into the workshop and many are already motivated. “When we joined the workshop, we still thought we were going to sit for placements. But now we have changed our mind,” says Pavan Kumar from Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute of Engineering and Technology. Pavan, along with his teammates Subhashini and Ravi, is working on having a smart accident system, wherein an app can get to know that you have met with an accident and will send out an alert to an ambulance.
Not many students are from the top 10 engineering colleges in the city, instead, the focus is on the others, the colleges under JNTU where students don’t know about entrepreneurship. Ramesh Loganathan says, “From a college like IIIT-H, which has the best incubator in India, many students are opting to go for placements with higher pay packages. So think about the other colleges, which don’t have these resources. The aim of this workshop is to change the mindset of students, to make them believe in entrepreneurship.”
Faculty members from each college too are supposed to accompany the students. “The idea is that after this workshop, they can go back and encourage more students,” says Ramesh.
Veda Samhita, a student of JNTUH College of Engineering Manthani, Karimnagar, pitched her idea and when there were errors, she didn’t feel let down. “At the workshop, we are being encouraged to ideate. What’s the market value of the app? Why should people pay to use the app? These are a few questions that we are being asked.”
Spending their vacation sitting in a room from 10 to 4 doesn’t seem as a bad idea to them. An added incentive is that 10 teams from the workshop will be given Rs 50,000.
