# UETM Collaboration Retrospective Email

###### tags: `Letters` `Education` `PAK-UETM`

Dear UETM Collaborators,

I'd like to begin this retrospective email by thanking you for giving my newly formed organization the opportunity to partner with your university for a program that I believed greatly benefited the students.

This will be a rather long document that will cover a lot of different topics, but I think it will serve as a useful record of what transpired since we started collaborating, and can inform much better collaborations in the future.

I was first introduced to UETM as a potential collaborator through a meeting with Dr. Sadaqat facilitated by Mr. Shahbaz Khan and Mr. Asim Bangash. I was honoured by the reception I was given because Dr. Sadaqat diligently brainstormed our collaboration avenues with helpful supporting documents. I learned about the university's FYP and CEP programs and was ready to see how I could integrate with them to provide value to the students.

In the weeks that followed our initial meeting at the UETM campus, I was assigned a cohort of 14 students to participate in my open source apprenticeship program. I requested that the university issue every student an @edu.pk email so that They could leverage the free software available to students, and so that I could begin communicating with them. I received a document with each students name and associated email, but I recommend that in the future, students be allowed to set their own email alias because it was difficult to identify students when their student number was their email alias.

During the first weeks of the apprenticeship, I organized and initial one on one meeting with every student to learn about them so that I could craft an optimal learning path for them. I was mainly looking for a common interests in common knowledge gaps so that I could create a curriculum that benefitted everyone.

The students first tackled our onboarding exercise

https://onboarding.grey.software/

In this exercise, many of them were introduced to the Markdown language and the Github/Gitlab platforms for the first time. In fact, this was the first time some of the students had an opportunity to practically apply distributed version control concepts such as forking a repository and adding changes to it, and submitting a request to merge those changes back into the original repository.

Our onboarding exercise was built to be completed within an hour, and many students completed their assignment within the first few days. There were some students who procrastinated until I personally reached out to them so they could catch up with the rest of the class. At the end of the exercise, the students collaboratively populated their profile data on our org website.

https://org.grey.software/university-apprentices/pak-uetm/

For their second assignment, students were tasked with creating a personal website using modern open source web technologies that I had chosen: Nuxt, Vue, and Tailwind. I gave them the following template to build from, and made myself available to teach and support students as they worked on their personal websites.

https://github.com/grey-software/personal-website-starter-nuxt

I hadn't assigned a strict deadline for their personal websites because I wanted them to make updates to their websites throughout the academic year in preparation for their professional life, just as they would update their CV or LinkedIn profile. I did, however, expect them to modify the template I had provided and create a basic website upon which they could make future updates.

8/14 students completed the assignment, and I started seeing a trend within the students that had procrastinated on both assignments. I still personally reached out to the students and urged them to follow through because I was under the assumption that they would be graded for the work I was assigning them, and I personally don't like giving failing grades if I have the power to help.

## Apprenticeship Retrospective

## HEC certificate issue and how to handle things moving forward

## FYP Opportunities Next Year

## Complex Engineering Task Course