Initated and organised by: Lata Sivaprasad in coordination with Ms.Charu Gupta of Scholars’ Trust, VJTI.
Volunteers from Fortess: Lata Sivaprasad
Suresh Haridas
Ganesh Kulkarni
Suresh Kumar
B Gopal
Students: Aditi Ashok Borse
Aakash Mishra
Chetan Varanguse
Manoj Subash Pawar
Saamed
Vaibhav Shatalwar
Ms.Charu Gupta is actively involved with VJTI since 2012 and is Trustee of Young Scholar Trust. She was a Teacher earlier at St.Cathedral’s school.
This Trust has adopted a few interested students of the first, second, third and fourth year students who have been given scholarships by the Trust. The sponsored students come from the rural areas of Maharashtra and have a weak financial background. Fortess members in Mumbai have been interacting with Charu and the students sponsored by her since 2018. Students who are in the final year are identified by Charu every year for mock interview sessions with Fortess volunteers and then felicitated by Charu along with Fortess volunteers.
The general observation of volunteers during the mock interview sessions has been the wide gap between what the students have been specializing in and their desired career path. For example most of them expressed their desire to join IAS in order to improve the administrative services in the country. It seemed like that the students were well aware of the bottlenecks in the general administration existing in their region.
Prior to the zoom meet held on 11th June 2021, we got the bio-data of the students. Thereafter, each of the volunteers had a one to one interactive session on video call with the student for about an hour and a half as part of mock interview session. Among other discussions in the video call, the following were discussed.
FOLLOWUP INTERVIEW WITH A THANK YOU NOTE
During the zoom meet held on 11th June 2021, each of the students spoke on how happy they were with the one to one mock interview session. Further on, Fortess volunteers spoke at length on the need to focus on the subject of specialization vis-à-vis the need of the industry and also pursue their interest and hobbies. Gopal and Ganesh spoke in detail about the importance of mastering the fundamentals and concepts pertaining to the subject of specialization, as a prerequisite for job interviews. They further stressed the need to explore, think out of the box and always find solutions to problems and new areas of challenges. Lata spoke about the need for good communication skills and the importance of conversational English, need to develop soft skills which will help develop confidence, self-esteem, ability to face interviews confidently for employability. Lata further impressed upon the students to improve their digitial skills by getting familiar with various tools like Google forms, slide deck, photo collage, Python programming, etc. Suresh Haridas talked about the importance of future planning and to understand the need for commitment to the organisation and how to align the academic background with the relevant industry, as per the jobs applied for. Suresh Kumar spoke about the need to improve on bio-data and make in relevant and impressive. The need to be honest and true while answering questions posed by the interviewer was explained with examples.
The students further asked questions about options for career paths. At the end of the interactive session, students felt very happy and thanked the Fortess volunteers.
The recorded zoom meeting interaction has been uploaded on Fortess website.
