Blossoming Entrepreneurs in the Vacation !!!

Hi folks,

    It has been a little bit long break to write another post to seetha gangula. But this time I would like to share with you a new experience I got throughout last 4 weeks with my colleagues at university. Frankly I have never had that kind of a training or a practical involvement in a area where I have never dreamed before.

University of Moratuwa, being the best university in Sri Lanka specially when it comes to producing genius brains to the nation, has taken the initiative to make young entrepreneurs in  Software Industry. As a first step, they are hosting for an entrepreneurship training program since last year which is conducted over several countries with the contribution of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA and several other globally recognized sponsors like Google, Nokia etc. Around 35 students are taken part in this program annually from Faculty of IT, Department of Computer Science engineering and Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering. Having one and half month of vacation after the year end exam, I also applied for the program, mainly because I could not stay at home, workless for that much of long time. 

      The program started 18 June, soon after the exam and was said that it goes until 3rd August. 4 instructors from MIT, USA had come to sri lanka to guide us namely Ali, Amber for entrepreneurship training Emily and Wesley as technical assistants. At the very first day we understood that they are really educated and well qualified people and more importantly helpful in every aspect we needed. Ali was like the team leader and without him the team looked like nothing. Amber always tried to figure out our problems related to public speaking, business planning and other related aspects needed to become a successful entrepreneur.

 In first two weeks they taught us some of the key entrepreneurship skills, one need to acquire with practical examples. One unforgettable experience was at the very second day we were divided into groups and gave a bag of candy. All we had to do was go around the university and sell as much as we can within one and half hour and bring back as much as money we can. It was fantastic because university was like an abandoned school those days due to the non academic staff strike. We went to pretty much everywhere in the university to sell our candy despite of the dignity of the customers we sell. Most probably our customers were Professors, senior Lecturers, Department heads, Deans like high end people. It is hilarious when we recall that memory, how we talked to those people to influence them to buy from us rather than from other groups. any how my group managed to earn around 1250/= from candy which were actually worth around 1000/=.

That was our first out of the class activity as an entrepreneur. :)

Within the first two weeks we were able to learn python along with Django web frame work which was totally new thing to us. Since we were expected to start a start up using IT , it was necessarily to learn something related to mobile technology. Android programming was the one we were facilitated to learn by wesley and emiley. Some days we sit on our chairs learning, and coding the whole day as groups. We talked about new  ideas for a start up as groups. refined them. Our ideas were criticized by the investors came. Almost all groups changed their top ideas and moved to new ideas. We drew business plans, customer profiles, use cases and many more. I think I had a chance to use what I learnt at my marketing class there. :D

Some days later, we found that our 4 lovely instructors were addicted to "Rambutan" seriously. Even suffering from severe cough, amber and Wesley were still chewing rambutan without knowing how it affects to coughing .

 Idea pitching day  was also a memorable day since we all had to present the same  idea as groups. Only one minute was given to explain the whole idea. We witnessed that even people who are fluent in english could not managed to express their idea within the given time. I think we had a good chance to improve our presentation skills as well by participating to this MIT-AITI program. Doing a presentation unprepared was like nothing for most of us after 2,3 weeks since every day we had to do several presentations.

 

There are two more weeks remaining for the demo day. These days most of teams are busy with building their products. I also have to contribute to our product. So I'll stop here promising you to present my next blog post about our start ups in details. Stay tuned !!!


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