What happens when a college student decides that the subjects being offered in school just aren’t enough to feed students’ intellectual appetites? He starts an online mentoring programme for college-goers to help high-schoolers dig into subjects, their teachers have never even fantasised about. Not in the classroom, anyway.
Mohammed Zeeshan is one of the founders of The Climber, which offers online mentoring programmes for subjects like Astronomy, Robotics, Psychology and more.
“These young mentors can guide them according to what is needed in the industry, today, not what was needed thirty years ago,” says Zeeshan, who is pursuing Mechanical Engineering in SRM University.
Students across generations were unaware of how to make career-oriented decisions. With few or no sources of information and a lack of support for their interests, they are driven away from what they wanted to do. Like Zeeshan, who admits that he too wanted to pursue Astronomy when he was seventeen. Assembling a team for The Climber was symbolic in its own sense, for Zeeshan recruited his schoolmates who wanted to be writers. This knit the team closer to the cause, for they wanted to do something else (Read: NOT Engineering). When they started out, The Climber found themselves face to face with one big obstacle - convincing schools to let them meet students.
“Educational institutions are very redundant when it comes to external organisations trying to enter their campuses,” says Zeeshan. However, they vigorously made their presence felt and schools allowed them to pitch their offbeat programmes. By and by, students got really involved and some of them from the creative writing programs of The Climber have published books, run blogs and even formed their own poetry circles.
Reach Out: www.theclimber.in