After four weeks of effort and hard work, I have finally reached the end of my internship with Asha. In this final week, I finished my project report – 6 research papers, full of 100s of statistics and images all summarised in 10 pages. My report highlights the severity and importance of youth unemployment and the need for skills development programs in India. I am currently waiting for feedback from the project leader to make any final changes required before I end my involvement with this project for Asha.
The report forms part of a bigger set of papers that will be presented to various organisations – Asha’s project partners – to ensure that Asha gets the help and recognition required to make an even bigger impact than at present. As a first step, it will be presented to the Education secretary at the Indian High Commission in London to create tie-ups with government based agencies in India. In particular, in the news recently, the Indian government has launched a new “Skill India” initiative to tackle the very problem that I cover in my report – Asha hopes to get involved with this scheme and this is a good first point of contact.
However, this is only the beginning. As a charity, Asha is always on the lookout for volunteers. At Imperial in particular, there is a lack of undergraduate presence. Once the academic term begins again, I hope to continue my involvement with Asha by liaising with the Imperial Indian and Hindu Societies to encourage more undergraduates to volunteer in their free time. It is immensely rewarding and hopefully my experiences can encourage others to undertake similar projects in the holidays.
Before finishing off, I would just like to say a quick thank you to Vidhya Sridhar and Anant Jani, my Imperial supervisor and project leader respectively, who have helped and guided me over the last month. It has been an excellent “introduction to the workplace” for me as this was my first internship and I hope to continue working with Asha in the future.
My project report (which is subject to change as mentioned above) is available from my Department of Computing website here – http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~vk714/InsightsReport.pdf