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A bit late this time because the past 2 weeks have been very hectic: company work (agentic AI training in first half, CS17 in second half), entrance interviews, calls, and more.

Catch Up

The internal team had a call (Foundation, Chetna, and I) for a catch up. Here are a few things we discussed and decided:

1. New admissions to be closed on 15th June, 2026
2. Students will be taken to Frappeverse Mumbai, 2026
3. Plan some outing (lunch, etc.) weekly

Surprise Dinner at Campus

On 27th May, I decided to have dinner with the students at the campus. The food as always was good. But after the food, we all took a walk to the badminton court and informally chatted for about an hour. Students shared their past experiences like hostel life, teachers, sports interest etc. And I answered questions about BWH, my school life, and more.

It was fun.

Academics

It was time to resume and tackle intermediate Calc and hence gave lectures on VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, conditional formatting, and more. Then we spent some time practicing the same. An interesting topic picked last week was Boolean Algebra. Again if you want to look into all the topics, check out the Teacher’s handbook here.

The students worked on and submitted Problem Set 2 which helped them practice Calc even further. It took me quite some time to develop problem set 2, here is why it is interesting:

1. Real life worksheet: Inventory Management
2. Using proper formulas and lookups to find stock status
3. Combining columns with formulas and applying conditional formatting

As I had anticipated, they struggled a bit with a few problems, but with a few hints and indirect explanations, they did it! All of them submitted on time and we rewarded them with a packet of Chips and a chocolate each (Shivam’s idea 🙌🏼). On Wednesday this week, Shivam gave them a walkthrough of the assignment. Office suite is wrapped for now.

This week we tackled the very basics of Algorithms and Flowcharts and then spent the rest of the week practicing the same.

Attention to Detail

Shivam has taken ownership of reviewing assignments and giving walkthroughs. He has a very good attention to detail and we want the students to develop the same. I will give you an example: if the assignment mentions to name your spreadsheet file in a specific format, the student must follow that. Only 1 of the girls did that in P2.

Shivam is making sure that he highlights such things during the walkthrough and why reading and understanding the problem carefully is very important. I am hopeful this will improve soon.

Interviews

Rekha ji is hard at work in doing out-reach. Students have been dropping by for entrance tests from further towns like Bijapur, Kondagaon, Kanker, etc. We ended up selecting 3 more after interviews, which brings the total to 11!

After I wrote the last paragraph (2 days ago), we had our first drop out 😔, one of the new girls dropped out in ~48 hours. I would not disclose the reason here, but it was not academics or CS17 related, it was more of a “personal” problem. Now we are at 10.

Progress on CS17 Portal

Isha has been working on the custom app for CS17 portal and I have been reviewing her PRs. We made it public this week and you can find the source code of the app here.

On thursday, we gave them access to the portal, and will be using the same for assignment submissions and announcements going forward.

I also setup a LinkedIn page for CS17 yesterday.

All Hands

The team visited the Campus last week for our weekly “All hands” meeting. I was out of town that day, but they now know the process: discussion circle where each one has to give updates on what they did in the past week (in English).

Since, Isha and Harsh are in town, they accompanied too. Talking to Isha had a different effect on girls.

Then they all had lunch together.

Turns out some prospective student’s parents were also present during the all hands and were impressed by the existing student’s experience till now.

The highlight of yesterday’s all hands was Vishwajeet (who takes Mathematics classes) sharing his experience from his travel to Nepal.

After the all-hands discussion, we gave them access to and walkthrough of Raven, for internal chat:

Time Management

For the past week, I have been taking the AI Cohort online training in the first half and going to CS17 Campus in the second half. Rahul and Shivam have been helping them practice flowcharts and algorithms. I am planning to have a proper time table next week, so I can plan my time better, but let’s see. Vishwajeet was out of town the past week, hence we had cover for Mathematics lectures too.

Up Next

As decided, we will close off new admissions on 15th June, so my plan is to take a few “Crash Course” classes to bring the new students up to speed. Others can also attend for revision.