CHENNAI: At 5 am, seven students of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) walk onto a porch connected to one of their dormitories, holding mugs of coffee. The dorm, where they work, has been repurposed into a small office for the team to work on Hogworts, a web-based platform for hosting university projects to help students.
“The name Hogworts came to be because I wanted to refer to a place that had innovation in every corner. I wanted to refer to a place where magic happens, and so we settled on the name of the school from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, except a little different,” explained Chaitya Patel, a 21-year-old final year student in Engineering Physics.
For the last two months, his dorm room at the IIT-M campus has been the office for Satwik Gupta, Rohit Gavirni, Aakarsh Chopra, Nirmalraj Roy, Dipam Shah and Zenith Sugo, all from different engineering streams like Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Chemical Engineering.
The team won the Red Bull Basement University challenge nationals, a hunt for the best ideas from around the world that aim to bring about positive change on their college campuses, with their web-based platform, Hogworts. Drawing from the success of companies originating from college projects like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, the platform hopes to bring together students, faculty and alumni.
“These are all facilities that impact people’s lives. We found that what separated the successful bunch from the not-so-successful was the presence of a strong community at an early stage. Hogworts will help provide a community of experts for students. This kind of critique and feedback is important for college projects, and this offers students an incentive-based system,” said Chaitya.
Alumni and faculty members can also offer solutions for specific problems for certain projects and aid in the growth of the project. The team noted that most college projects followed a similar trajectory and often made similar mistakes, which they hope to avoid with their platform.
Hogworts came to fruition after Chaitya and Nirmal attempted, in their second year, to begin their own start-up, which eventually failed, according to Chaitya. He recalled visiting various start-ups in Bengaluru for advice. After going to Stanford University in California for an entrepreneurship programme in April this year, Chaitya felt that he has returned with a better understanding of the start-up ecosystem, and this led to the formative idea around Hogworts.
“They always say you have to be a little crazy to do something big. If you always look at the practical aspect, you’re never going to do it. Something I want to tell students like myself is that you can always find a job. I’d ask them not to waste four years looking for or preparing for a job. I’d ask them to create something. Anything!,” said Chaitya.
The team will take part in the Red Bull Basement University Global Meeting, which will be held in Berlin from today to December 2