In this section of ‘Startups for U‘, we are going to give a spot to the technological startups working for common people. And, we are going to start this with Frontbench, a startup working with an aim to empower millions of students.
In India, engineers are like swarms of fly. You can spot them everywhere, in fact anywhere. According to a recent report, around 1 million graduates pass out as engineers every year, out of which a whopping 70% are unemployable.
Deepak Kumar, a student based in the National Capital Region (NCR) used to receive innumerable requests from students of Tier 2/Tier 3 colleges in meetups and on social platforms for the right mentorship and guidance. He says, “Most of the problems, expressed by the students were almost very similar. So, in the month of October, I created an open source repository so that every student can get the roadmap to move in the right direction during their college life. To my surprise, A to Z resources was among the top 3 trending repositories on Github for a month”. Seeing the response, Deepak, Akhand, Avinash and Venkatesh converted the repository into a centralised portal.
Venkatesh says “What started out as an addressal to a local problem, seemed universal. The repository had the contribution from more than 600 contributors across the world. We realised that there is a huge asymmetry of information. There is an obvious reason why an IIT graduate grabs a package of 1.5 crore – they are more aware. Majority of the students of Tier 2/Tier 3 colleges haven’t heard about GSoC (Google Summer of Codes) or ACM ICPC. Even if they have, they lack the right guidance or mentorship. The problem isn’t that there is a lack of motivation in students coming from Tier 3/Tier 2 colleges but information seems to be far away from them, even though it’s just a click away, in this digital age”.
Through Frontbench, they aim to democratise information flow. Avinash adds that we are bridging information asymmetry by ensuring a horizontal and a vertical spread of information. We want to empower and enlighten the students of Tier 3 colleges by helping them to find the right resources to learn, explore opportunities like foreign internships, seminars, hackathons etc. Frontbench tech team led by Akhand claims to leverage machine learning and data-driven techniques to provide end to end tailor-made resources to students.
Their aim is to empower 4 million students in the next one year.
You can check out the website here: Frontbench
