Campus Connexions 2011: Spanning Faster, Better, ‘Vaster’

A view of the hall at Campus Connexions 2011

So thousands of person-hours of interaction between industry, academia and students, we reached the Royal Rodale in Karachi on the 11th of February, for a 4-hour event earmarking the culmination of Campus Conversations (South Tour). That’s 10 CIO Campus Conversations and 10 Mentor Nashta sessions. The industry professionals, which comprised of CEOs, CIOs and Directors commented that the sessions helped them get that first foot in the door. The students from universities such as FAST-NU, NED, SSUET, UIT, Iqra, SZABIST, CBM, IBA and BizTek remarked that the interactions were a first for most of them. And even if the interaction wasn’t a first, the experience to have industry leaders actually willing to listen to their voices, was.

So the Campus Connexions 2011 was a milestone for achieving all of this. We invited 130 people, comprising of students, industry and HoDs and faculty. 122 people showed up. We invited mentors to participate in the Mentor Train for a handful of pre-registered students, and the train zoomed through all kinds of boundaries and time constraints.

We thought we’d be bold and put a student, and industry professional and an HoD in the spotlight in the middle of the hall surrounded by their peers and judges to fight out hypotheses we developed based on all the commentary that was received through the Conversations, and the effort paid off. Moderated by media personality, Naveen Naqvi, and supported by an entire hall full of people who wanted to have their viewpoints heard, we managed to generate some blackeyes and bruises by way of Knockout!

The winners of the Knockout Round were:

Student rep: Arifa Batool (FAST-NU)
Academia rep: Tehmina Lodhi (HoD, Media Sciences, Iqra University)
Industry rep: Shoaib Nizami (CEO, Corporits)

Lastly, we organized the grand Board of Fame, where we provided all the students with a 4″x4″ card to write up an idea on how they would like to tweak an existing app or business idea. The Board filled up and sponsor and judge, Zahoor Motiwala (TMT Ventures) along with his selected panel of guest judges, Imran Daudi (CIO, Engro Corp) and Azhar Rizvi (CEO, TAN) rewarded a small token prize to Arfa Batool from FAST-NU for her idea.

We’re extremely grateful to our sponsors and partners for their faith, support and patronage. These include:

• InfoTech
• Nokia
• PSEB
• Folio 3
• Engro
• TMT Ventures
• Dawn News & CityFM89
• Brightspyre
• P@SHA

More details from the event along with insights as to how well we did with having our speakers prove and disprove the hypotheses presented, so check back in this space again!

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