If you are looking for students who are willing to go outside the coursework, have independent thought process and ready to experiment at the cost of some 'wasted' time, you will be disappointed with the quality of standard students. You will have to weed through a lot of them to get a handful of good ones. I think the key is for people like you is to start cultivating the culture of 'garage experimenting mentality' which seems largely absent here. Sadly, it doesn't stop at students level. Most of the IT industry emplpoyees want to be given their assignments and plan of implementationon a platter. But I digress.

If you find such good people, please hold on to them.

One 'non-standard' idea is to ask the colleges to handout leaflets during the gatherings and college festivals. All the colleges in Pune will have them on a large scale next month. This is also the time when there are a lot of intercollege competitions held, some of them are technical quizes. You can ask if you can announce your intern positions during such competitions. Usually active participants in these social events are also the smart and entusiastic bunch of all.

Hope it helps.

Post it to http://10internship.in , I have found them good. There are other internship sites. People from IIT stats / maths background also available for internship.

You can post it on http://www.hellointern.com.

Great post Abhay. I would like to give me view as a student. I will break up this issue into 3 parts :

1. Channels for reaching the student
2. Reaching right student at right time
3. Convincing student for a non-research / research start up internship

They are in increasing order of difficulty acc to me.

1. Convincing student : The most difficult thing

   • Reasons:

     • a) Internships are not officially in curriculum (read:No marks),except for final year project , that too one day per week.
     • b) We have only 15 days summer break, 15 days winter break.
     • c) Fantasies for cubicles, laptops, goodies like bags/tshirts, huge campus , plus a 6 figure salary at the end. Come on, other than you their is IBM, Tibco, Amdocs , nVidia and whole bunch of biggies coming.
     • d) Part time? Work? "Oh,my books missing me!" If I dont get 75% Microsoft wont hire me! I would rather sit home and study.
     • e) Research? Whats that? Which language I will learn? (Sadly, its more abt Java/ .NET than NLP/AI/Data Mining )
     • f) Research is fun in its own way - Not the students way! Reading papers, experimenting , heavy analysis - Not everyone is ready to do it. Ah many a times, title itself is so horrendous that people give up. Fact.

   • Internships are not part of curriculum , nor do they carry any marks. After 40 days of stressful exam session, we get only 15 days break. Its difficult to convince one and one to himself to go and work for a start up.

   • Some students just want to study ( I was also one of them ). It difficult to convince that not only Microsoft internships count. Convince that a good balance of descent marks and projects is way better than only extra-ordinary marks.

   • Plus, research is a alien concept for us. We have never done that and nor our curriculum is framed that way. Its difficult to convince one that its a good project to take up, it will take you long way. "Optimizing X in Y" is difficult to convince to student who dont know anything about X/Y.

   • I have done 3 internships till date and 4th(not really a internship) is more of research one under Dreamz group(Abhay's mention). My first two internships were at start up and then I did at Sun Microsystems. It was totally CONTRASTING experience. At Sun, there are 1500 people around. A lavish cubicle. Two machines,loads of goodies, expensive dinner with manager. Plus a brand in resume, may be a 6 fig sal job? Why shall I come to you?

2. Reaching right student at right time :

   • Ofcourse, whatever is the case, atleast there are 20-30% students who want to work with you.

   • The right time to tap is at the end of 2nd year or mid-3rd year. As is, we dont do anything related to CSE in FE. By end of SE/TE we have basics about databases/datastructures at right place.

   • Going too early would mean more time for getting started. Going too late would be useless since whole cream would have been absorbed by biggies.

3. Channels : Now that we want to get hold of ONLY this 20-30%.

   • Normal Ways :

     • a) Via professors/HOD : I don't know about other colleges, but if you just send over a mail to my HOD , it will be there on the notice board within 2-3 days. I have myself seen many of them.
     • b) Via TnP: Dont know, it doesn't really work out in PICT. No harm in giving a shot.
       c) Mailing List/ Techstart / Internship mela :
       Being tried, does work at times.

   • My suggestions :

     • a) Events:
       
       • Every college has some technical event. There are competitions for Project and Coding. They need "JUDGES". There need is you and you need them. Why to wait?
         
         • You can spend 2-3 hrs on weekend and visit 3-4 colleges. You can easily get a 10-12 interns with just 10-15 hours of time. Plus they will be showcasing there skills which will help you in judging their quality too.
         • These are organised solely by students. No profs involved. So you can easily be a part of it.
         • This really works and being used for recruitment at PICT. PICT's INC has 300-400 judges coming for InC. I dont know about any IIT/NIT which has such a event. The only criteria to become a judge is 2 years experience. If you dont want to be a judge, but just visitor. You can drop in. No one will stop you :-)
     • b) SIGs : For a domain, form a group and spend 2-3 hrs twice a month with students. How about a Android developer group where you give a talk twice a month, get hold of curious-geeks-the-right-fit?
     • c) Let the students find you ;) /me thinks startups have done what they could. Techstart, POCC are good initiatives. Definitely, a self-motivated guy will find you. Too much spoon feeding wont work and too-much-spoon-feeding-is-not-a-startup-material. I know as a intern, I was QA/BA/PM/Dev-All in one.
     • d) SICSR is the only happening place :-( I bet, many other college students dont even know about POCC / Techstart. So for (c) to work, I would suggest round robin scheduling of events. Students will come to know about you and things will be become alot simpler!