How Programming Pathshala started?
When we were in college at IIT BHU, we used to organise meditation and stress-relief workshops. While introducing these meditation workshops, we used to ask students, what is it that they would want to learn to succeed, a lot of them would say coding- while we wanted them to say meditation.
For students at IIT, the common pain point was that over 90% of the companies visiting the IIT Campus were software companies and only 10% of students studied Computer Science in their degree. Similarly, range of packages offered to students studying computer science was very often 5-10 times more than a non-coding Job offer.
10th January 2016, we were pondering on ways to help these students and in the midnight, we floated a form of interest to learn coding and over 600 students signed up in 5 minutes. We selected 120 of them and did a week-long evening workshop.
Many students on this first workshop like Rishabh Acharya picked it up and made it to Razorpay from Mining Engineering. Numerous other students made it to Walmart, Microsoft and other Tech companies while they came from core branches like chemical and mining engineering.
We did numerous workshops at IIT BHU and were later invited to Lovely Professional University (LPU)in June 2016.
Even for brilliant students there, Capegemini was a goal and our job was to pull that bar up. It was a new experiment for us.
At LPU, problem statement by their placement coordinator was very simple, get at least one of our student crack software developer job at amazon. We did a 10 days workshop in the summers of June. 24 of their students passed the coding assessment of amazon and 7 of them got full time offers. This was unprecendented and astonished everyone, including us.
Wonderful students like Gourav Bhattacharya, Jitin Chouhan, Prabhakar, Vikrant, Sourabh Anand and few others made it to amazon as Software Developer, as if it was a cakewalk. We had figured out the exact way to prepare students for top-tech companies.
Since 2016, Programming Pathshala went through numerous transformations, about half a dozen colleges, 10,000+ students, online offline programs and a lot of hustle-bustle. In 2019, Vivekanand Vivek and Bharat Khanna, who worked at Amazon and Tower Research Capital, left their high-paying jobs to teach full-time with Programming Pathshala and we started our online programs. In an year, we are a team of 15 people and have thousands students working across the best of tech organisations in the country and outside India.
Prayer is that we remain useful and should be able to kindle the confidence in people about themselves. We now envision to democratise access to excellent tech-education to every willing student and help them become excellent software engineers.
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