Several weeks of hard work by four engineering students of Bhimavaram has finally paid off. They would be flying to the United States next month and take a tour of the Silicon Valley as part of the University Innovation Fellows programme supported by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and Google.
It was a momentous occasion for the four students of S.R.K.R. Engineering College on Monday when they were officially named the University Innovation Fellows (UIF). They are among the 14 students across India to be selected for arguably a rare opportunity to visit Silicon Valley.
The UIF team was simply bowled over by the innovative idea of the four — Yadavali Naga Venkat Rama Srikanth, Bhupathi Raju Ajay Kumar, Nadimpalli Dinesh Sai Varma — in third year of Electronics and Communication Engineering and Garapaty Sai Susruth, pursuing second year of Computer Science Engineering. They worked on researching and mapping their college campus landscape and building strategies towards making it better.
“After applying for the programme, we were given many tasks, and interacted with the UIF teams almost every day and expressed our ideas and strategies for innovation,” said Ajay Kumar speaking to The Hindu .
“We went through many phases and took up assignments like business model canvas, landscape canvas, design thinking, lean start-up and others that tested our ability to think innovatively,” said Ajay and his teammate Srikanth.
On March 15, the team would be attending the ‘Silicon Valley Meetup’ and meet hundreds of fellows from across the world, besides visiting campuses of Google and other IT giants in the Valley. They will be trained in various aspects. “Later on, we will be the face of innovation in our campus and act as ‘change agents’ to educate more students and create more fellows for the programme from our campus,” they said.
Visiting the campus of Google and taking part in the workshop at Stanford University for two days are the interesting part of the trip, Dinesh said. The college is taking care of their travel expenses. The team was congratulated and given certificates of appreciation by the College at the inaugural event of Innovation Day held on the College campus on Monday.
