This is the second in PuneTech’s Improving Education series of posts detailing the efforts being taken by people in the tech industry in Pune to give our students a chance at giving their career a solid foundation by acquiring skills that are valued in the industry with guidance from experienced mentors from the industry. The first in the series was Techstart.in, a program to nurture the passions of students by guiding them to implement specific, and interesting projects. Today we cover KQInfoTech’s idea of having a Post Graduate Diploma in Systems Programming where the students don’t actually pay for the course, but end up being funded by industry in return for completing projects.

KQInfoTech was started by Anurag Agarwal and Anand Mitra, both of whom chucked high-paying jobs in the industry because they felt that there was a desperate need to work on the quality of students that is being churned out by our colleges. For the last year or so, they have been trying various experiements in education, at the engineering college level. All their experiments are based on one basic premise: students’ ability to pay should not be a deterrent – in other words, the offerings should be free for the students; KQInfoTech focuses on finding alternative ways to pay for the costs of running the course. Their latest offering is the KQInfoTech PG Diploma in Systems programming which they explain thus:

This PG Diploma is for the people looking for making a career in the system programming.

It is a program in the “Gurukul” tradition of education. There are two unique features to this program :

• Cost: Your education does not depend on your capacity to pay. This course is effectively free. Your education gets paid by your work during this program.
• Work experience: You are also getting real industry work experience during your education. During this course, you will get one year worth industry experience.

Does working in Linux Kernel, writing device drivers for Unix and Windows, writing system level programs that interacts closely with operating system interests you? But you don’t have the right skill set for this.

KQInfotech is lead by people who have spent decades working in the area of file system, kernel programming, Linux kernel etc. They are ready to educate you in “Art of System Programming”. Are you ready for all the hard and interesting work required?

It is a unique post graduate program of one year, which would provide you education as well as work experience. This program will cover Unix internals, Linux kernel programming, Multi-threading, Windows internals, Writing device drivers etc.
1. Industry Experience

Experience gained working on live industry project is more important than just theory based education. Two third of this program’s duration will be spent on real industry project as interns. Beside gaining industry experience, internship makes this program free for participants.
2. Course Details

Experience of Unix or System Programming is not a pre-requisite for the course.

The course is divided into three broad areas namely Unix internals, Linux Kernel and Windows System programming. To cement the concepts candidate will have to submit a month long project or thesis in each area. Whole course is divided into a number of modules. These modules are:

• Introduction of Unix
• Advance system programming in Unix
• Rapid development tools
• POSIX multi threading
• Linux Kernel internals
• Linux device driver development
• WinAPI
• Windows device driver development

Each module will be covered over a duration of 4 to 6 weeks and each project will run for 4 weeks.The program stresses on imparting knowledge through practicals and hence more than 50% of the time will be spent on programming.

3. Eligibility

Participants with following qualifications can apply for this course.

• BCS, or BSc with Computer Science
• MCS/MCA final year students
• BE in any field
• People with industry experience

4. Selection Process

Candidates will be selected on the basis of a written technical and aptitude test, followed by a technical and personal interview. Syllabus for technical test contains :

• C programming language
• Data structure and algorithms
• Operating system concepts

Entrance exam will be held on 20th Jan at 10:00 AM. Duration of exam will be 2 hours.

Diploma course will start from 2nd Feb.

Next batch will start from 3rd Aug. Corresponding entrance exam will be held on 20th July.
5. Logistics

It is an intense program with 12 hours of daily commitment for one year. One third of that time would be training and the rest will be internship.

There will be security deposit of 10,000/- (Ten thousand) rupees for this course. On completion of this course, deposit will be returned to the participant. Every participant needs to have a laptop for this course, participant can bring their own laptop, or we can arrange one for them for a security deposit of 25,000/- (Twenty five thousand). At the end of the course, the participant can return the laptop to get back the deposit.

6. Placement

Market for system programming is huge. There are a large number of companies looking for people with these skills. Symantec, Symphony, Calsoft, Persistent, Marvell, KPIT, Wipro, Infosys are to name few of them.

We will provide placement assistance to all participants.

The website for this course is here. For more details on Anurag and Anand’s background see the about us page on KQInfoTech.

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