Eight weeks, fifty builders, amazing projects, awesome sessions and tons of learning and building
In this post I want to share my personal experience with Polygon Fellowship. If you are interested in what I learned in the fellowship, I have an entire series dedicated to it which you can start here.
How I got in?
I want to start from the very beginning. I got a mail from Devfolio about a fellowship they were organizing with Polygon. At first, I was quite hesitant to fill out the form, but a whole hearted thanks to my roommates for constantly reminding me to do so. I took around two weeks to fill the form and after a bunch of rewrites I finally submitted the form.
Since I had previously been turned down for the Ethereum Fellowship and the Solana Fellowship, I was not very optimistic about being chosen for the fellowship. Thus, when I received this mail,
I couldn't believe it, I read it few more times to confirm it (I am not making this up xD). Thus started the fellowship.
Sessions, Study Material and Assignments
Each week of the fellowship covered one domain of Web3, like Defi, NFTs, Infrastructure etc. and was jammed with sessions, study material and assignments related to it. The study material was not made to be taken as in, it was made in such a way that it demanded a lot of research. The assignment were also kept challenging for us to give a lot of time to learning.
Week 1 had an intro session, and being an ambivert was I reluctant to speak up, I was so relieved when it went smoothly. Anyway, I eventually grew accustomed to turning on the mic and appearing on camera during the sessions. Each session was not only jam-packed with knowledge, but it also included a separate QA session, which was really helpful to me.
Week 2 was about solidity and the assignment was a little hard for me, but someone from the community helped we with it on VOICE CHANNEL, without sharing the solution. I was awestruck 💜. I realised that Web3 has an awesome community and I can always rely on it.
Week 3 was again very challenging, it covered DeFi and it took me a lot of research to complete the assignment but for me the toughest part was the presentation. Each beginner track fellow was given a DeFi protocol and asked to make a presentation about it. I kind of messed up while presenting it but nevertheless enjoyed presenting.
Week 4 to 7 went smoothly, since I got accustomed to speaking in public, sharing my ideas, by the week 7 I also started knowing a lot of fellows and connected to them on Twitter and other socials.
During Week 6 and 7 the emphasise was on working on a project idea and present it to our mentors. I felt proud when my project idea was praised by my mentor as well as other peeps in Fellowship.
My idea was Translat3 which is a a decentralized localization platform, where you will be able to localize your projects in a given language and translators will be rewarded for right translations. You can check that project out here
The Hackerhouse
The hacker house was one of the best part of the Fellowship. It was a week long stay at The Paul Bangalore where all the fellows were invited to build together.
When I first visited there, I was so scared of talking to anyone. Now that I look back I am so happy that I took that step and said "gm" to a bunch of fellows. It worked as an ice breaker for me and after that I was able to talk to anyone.
The entire week was filled with sessions and we were able to talk to the speakers not only during the QA, but also after the sessions.
We also had Nintendo nights with Aniket and other fellows.
BUT, what I enjoyed the most was late night building sessions fuelled by Devfolio's super strong cold brew coffee in hackerhall with other fellows. We helped each other out, improvise each other's idea, had tones of meaningful conversation and worked on building the projects. It was insanely fun.
Presentation Day
I was most apprehensive about this day. We have to present our project to VCs, and I was quite anxious about it. It's one of my greatest accomplishments that I was able to make everyone laugh at the beginning of my presentation. During the presentation something went wrong and the Translations in Translat3 weren't showing up, my heart was pounding so fast that if I had been even a little closer to the microphone, everyone would have heard it. I managed to finish the presentation, and it came to a great conclusion. I was able to answer all of the VCs' queries.
Convocation Day
On the last day of Hacker House, we had a small convocation ceremony, were given a token of appreciation too. I felt a little emotional this day, since it was the last day with those amazing people.
Conclusion and Future
I am very grateful to the Devfolio and Polygon team for choosing me as one of the fellow and making this Fellowship a great and impactful event. I never thought I could be a part of something this awesome. I am pretty much sure all the fellows I met during this fellowship will keep on building amazing stuff and will the keep builder spirit alive. I have also decided not to participate in fellowships that are made for beginners anymore since I want more and more people to become a part of the builder community and this amazing experience I have had. Lastly, if you are stuck somewhere or you need any kind of help in Web3 you can reach out to me here twitter.com/rakshit087
Never Stop Building :)