How I Started CareerGuide.com- A Story by Surabhi Dewra
I had always been a studious child and completed my high school from Hyderabad. In my summer vacations I take up substitute teacher assignments in schools. I used to participate in lots and lots of extracurricular activities. When I say lots, it means, I remember most of my school days being spent in taking part in inter- and intra-school competitions, state level competitions like debating, essay writing etc.
I have very fond memories of traveling to different places, meeting kids from different schools because in all these contests and competitions, students of schools from outside Hyderabad would also participate. It was not that I always won them. I remember the time when I would not and how disappointed I would feel, but I’m happy with this god gifted attitude -I would not give up and I would rather say, “hey, let’s try it next time” and I would think what was it that I did not do well and so I would work on improving that skill.
For essay writing competition, I would reach out to people who could help me figure out how to do it. I would call 10 people from the PCO — my school principal, teachers and I would ask them if they could give me some points to write so that I could improvise. I think taking guidance from seniors have been an integral part of my success.
And then I happened to get into junior college — Narayana. So, in Hyderabad it is an obvious choice for everybody to take mathematics, physics, chemistry and prepare for engineering. There’s nothing one can think beyond or in other words you can become anything if it’s between engineer or doctor.
I was fortunate that I managed to get the state rank and managed to get admission to BITS-Pilani. Nothing was planned as such. It kept happening. I don’t know what would have I done if I didn’t get into BITS-Pilani, because that was the genesis of me starting the careerguide.com venture. So, taking it as a fluke, I started working towards it, but I wasn’t working in a planned manner.
So, when I got into BITS, I continued the extracurricular activity part. Also, it took me a while to adjust to the new environment, to open up to people because of the diversity- we had like 900 students from different states of India. And each one of them was brilliant in something or the other, just not academics. They were all brilliant and that’s why they were there. It was a phenomenal experience for me to meet this talented bunch of people. I made friends with them and then tried to create my own identity. Being in a different environment, taught me a lot I must say.
I remember that BITS had a very fascinating concept- elective courses. It was like despite one being into engineering, they were allowed to take electives from any field like Humanities, Management and I took up Public-Speaking and Bhagvad Geeta as my electives. It was very fascinating and that’s where I started exploring more, and this curiosity made me explore the intricacies of entrepreneurship as well.
We had set up the country’s first Incubation center (E-cell) in our college and so it was promoting entrepreneurship big time. We used to have weekly & monthly activities which became part of the E-cell. And I met some brilliant people during the guest lectures. I remember attending a guest lecture by Amit Ranjan, Founder-SlideShare. It is very inspiring when you find people doing exceptionally different things and that also taught me a lesson that if you’re an engineer, it doesn’t mean you stick to that. It’s ok to do other things, and one could even change fields and experiences.
When I was doing my electives of public speaking, I became a teaching associate. I was teaching public speaking even to the PhD students. I really enjoyed that part. I also remember taking tuition of professor’s kids for Math and other subjects. And I liked earning my own pocket money so I would take tuitions and earn money while other kids would go out and spend money. These are a couple of my fond memories from my school and college days.
My specialisation had been electronics and electricals. So, after college, I worked a couple of years into semiconductor industry. I did get a chance to work on first few chipsets of iPhone also with my company, which was into semiconductors. But I missed being a teacher, so I think being an educationist was part of my DNA.
I think because my heart was inclined towards entrepreneurship, I learnt technology and became comfortable with it. I always had a passion for imparting education so I think it was bound to happen. I spent a lot of time with educational NGOs to learn and then eventually in 2011, I started a campaign called meracareerguide.com which eventually became careerguide.com in 2015. So, we stayed into career guidance, but the business model, the form and everything got transformed based on our early market experiences.
(As narrated to Akanksha Verma, Bloggers Alliance team)
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Brief Profile
Surabhi is an entrepreneur who left her 9–5 job, to continue her passion in education. She wanted to solve the problem of confused students all over the country and to pursue this dream launched her startup CareerGuide.com. Ever since then, she hasn’t looked back. Today, her venture provides career guidance to over 5 million students every year throughout the country. To know more, you may visit https://www.surabhidewra.com/ and https://www.careerguide.com/surabhi
