10Pearls FYP accelerator program — x Mentee Experience.
If 10Pearls is your dream tech company/software house in Pakistan, you’ve rightly come across this opportunity’s briefing.
FYP 10Pearls accelerator program is a mentorship opportunity for the 3rd/4th-year students for their respective FYPs (Final Year Project).
This program will only provide mentorship for your FYPs and not your personal projects, as the title of this program suggests.
Also, before applying for this program they expect you to have your FYP idea, its roadmap, FYP partners, and an FYP supervisor.
If you don't have any supervisor assigned yet, you may coordinate with the chairman or the class advisor and show them your interest in applying for this program. They’ll help you with the required supervisor’s information.
I have had experience in the FYP 10Pearls accelerator program, the acknowledgment for the same can be found on my LinkedIn.
About FYP:
I have left a detailed FYP guide blog here. Recommended to be read before proceeding ahead.
Application Process:
The application for this program has 26th August 2022, 11:59 PM as the last submission day for your FYP ideas.
The application process itself includes only filling out one of their required forms with some questions regarding the FYP (all the questions can be answered by reading my blog here)
Upon careful selection based on the following criteria your project gets shortlisted:
• Involves latest technologies
• A unique idea
• A solution to a local problem
• Has a complete roadmap.
Our Journey:
With regards to my team, we had a productive time spent in this mentorship/apprenticeship.
It all started after getting a selection email back in December 2021, following the orientation in January 2022 to later kickstarting the project.
The first phase we began with was to research our FYP, start learning Python, and other languages/libraries that our project required. While we were learning, we coded almost every Machine Learning concept to be used.
We then began with our development phase, involving the use of basic models and dataset collection. We found our dataset to be used from Kaggle — datasets’ open-source repository. In this phase, we made sure our model was accurate enough to achieve state-of-art results, and thus took longer to complete; including switching models, improving and enhancing the quality of outputs, and comparing previous results. Finally, our entire Deep Learning model was sorted and developed.
The progress for all this was asked in weekly meetings and we also had to be reported to our mentor, who made sure our issues in development get resolved at the earliest, and thus we were connected with the software engineers specifically aligning with the domain of our problem area and were introduced to using new tools.
The next task was to present the FYP on the final demo day to the panel of evaluators of 10Pearls. The team included high-level professionals and industry experts.
Since then the team has been giving us the opportunity to present our projects in meetings and help us find funding programs.
Benefits:
The program has the following benefits:
• Access to state-of-art facilities
• Working on emerging technologies
• Getting industry approval
• Adds value to the CV
• Get mentored by the industry’s leading professionals
- Get chances of direct hiring after graduation.
Team-level benefits:
Yet, the Personal (team level) benefits are as stated:
• First to complete the development of the project.
• Acing Initial FYP presentation
• Ample learning
• Appreciation from the supervisors and mentors
• Mentorship + networking with the 10Pearls employees and getting introduced to the ecosystem.
• Stepped into the industry
I’d highly recommend every student to apply for this program and never leave such opportunities at stake. Remember, opportunity only comes once. No regrets.
