In January 2013, Mission R&D partnered with 12 colleges based out of 4 locations in Andhra Pradesh – Bhimavaram, Kakinada, Visakhapatnam, and Hyderabad.
Pre-Summer Phase (February 2013 – April 2013):
In February 2013, Mission R&D ran a test on CS fundamentals and analytical skills for 2200 students from CS and IT streams from 12 partner colleges. The 450 most promising students were qualified for the second stage of selection process.
Over the next two months, the 450 were exposed to 40 hours of classroom instruction and 70 to 80 hours of online engagement using Facebook groups. Students worked on around 50 coding assignments and submitted them to Dropbox folders. The submitted code was evaluated and rated using an in-house built automated system. The classroom and online engagement were employed to perform a regular and methodical evaluation of students on code quality and correctness as well as the consistent commitment toward learning newer and challenging concepts.
In April 2013, an online test was held for the 450 and their test scores along with their earlier performance was considered to selecting the best 106 for the Summer program, and 52% of them are women! Thus, compared to the past year, 2013 selection process for Summer program is far more rigorous ensuring the selection of the most promising talent with a great potential.
Summer Camp (May 20 to June 28, 2013): The summer program is an intensive, full-time, and 6-week long classroom program that engages students from all colleges at one location over the summer vacation. This is convenient to students because they do not have to miss classes or be distracted by academic assignments to complete. The summer program is held at IIIT-H campus in Hyderabad, starting on May 20, 2013.
The Summer School combines classroom teaching (20%) and hands-on projects (80%) and covers all aspects of end to end product development in professional environment: planning, team allocations, source code control, gathering product requirements, formulating product specifications, making design choices, developing and testing clean and efficient code, and finally integrating many different individual product components into one unified system. Most importantly, while executing projects, students (learn to) actually work like members of teams working on major products at R&D companies.
Mission R&D Program 2013 is thus qualitatively much stronger than the first year program on 3 counts.
- A much expanded selection pool of 2200 students
- A more comprehensive and more rigorous selection procedure
- A significantly enlarged curriculum
Post Summer Camp (July 2013 – December 2013):
Post the completion of their course work, companies were invited to interview the students.
|
Partner colleges |
12 |
|
Number of students who attended the Professional Programming Course |
450 |
|
Number of Students in the Summer Camp |
106 |
|
Number of Female Students in the Summer Camp |
55 |
|
Average annual salary |
Rs.5.5 lac |