Walmart is having a special challenge If you are a 3rd year or final year student Then you are eligible for the same Its name is Sparkyphone and you can get a full time Entrepreneurship opportunity through this Along with that you can get prizes And I got a text from Chirag who was the winner of last year And he told me that he was my video last year and so I thought that he can tell you more about the entire process so that you can apply for it this year. The last set of application is till August and you can like apply for it right away. I'll give the link in the description, rest of the history links would be there in the description, make sure you do check it out and let's start the video.
Starting with the first very important question, what is Walmart's Parkathon? So Chirag, you have been a part of it, you have uh like you're currently a third year student and he has participated and he has won that competition he's currently doing an internship at walmart through this particular challenge only we'll talk about that also but what is walmart sparkathon uh hello guys i'm chirag and let's talk about what actually sparkathon is so basically sparkathon is an open innovation challenge for indian students and you can get prizes and you get chances of getting internship as well so that's what uh sparkathon is and like How did you come to know? How did you know last year when you participated?
And what were your thoughts on participating in this and why you actually did that? Okay, so last year it was one of our teammates that got an email from college that there's an event called Sparkathon. And then he formed a team.
He contacted me, Chirag, hi. There is a team called Emerging Tech. And in that Emerging Tech team, ARVR is something that is there.
And since we had a specialization in ARVR, we made a team where ARVR developers were purely present. We will discuss that part in detail but if someone participates in Walmart Sparkathon, what are the benefits? Okay, talking about benefits, first of all you get the first prize, which is your prize money.
And apart from that, you get a chance to attend the Converse event. which is conducted annually by Walmart in Bangalore and you get free tickets to attend the Converge event you get sponsored flights to the city you also get the chance to stay at the hotel and apart from this since it is a Converge event you will get to meet Walmart's industry standard people industry leaders and then You have speaker events in that Converse event where you get to meet Aman Gupta and Ankur Warikoo that attended the last Converse event. You also get the summer internship and you also get the chance to interview for the full-time role as well.
So generally, when you participated last year, what was the process? What was the first round? How did you submit?
And how were different rounds for this particular challenge? Okay, I think last year also the dates were same. and 15th of July, applications opened and you get an entire one month to think about what idea you have to submit. For us, we started during that time only and the process was something similar last year also.
So on 16th August, you had to submit your idea, your problem and what solution you are going to put in. Apart from this, you also have to create a two minute video and you have to upload that somewhere. on youtube or somewhere it is publicly accessible and you have to upload that link this is round one and you just have to submit this and once you submit this the judging will be done based on some criterias that we'll discuss later and based on that judging criteria only eight teams are going to be selected for the final round and then there is going to be a grand jury round we have to pitch the idea then you have to present your video whatever video you have created and then there's going to be a q a session even for this also there's some uh time timeline given so your pitch has to be three minutes three minutes pitch two minutes of video video presentation and 10 minutes of q a session Now we are talking about upscaling but how do we upscale with this?
Many people must have heard about GFG where we practice but they have their courses also. And they launched a challenge in January called 390 challenge. Under which if you complete their course like 90% of the course. In 90 days, then you get a 90% refund.
You will get 90% refund for the amount you paid. And this was very successful. They relaunched in July. And this is applicable on all their courses.
Whether you want to study DSA, System Design, or Data Science. All the courses. available in all the courses. So if you were thinking of taking such a course or upskilling, this can be the best opportunity where you can get the refund also and at the least cost possible. Check out the link in the description, I will give you the link, you can check out and you can explore if you wanted to take such a course.
Now let's move on to the video. When you were participating last year, what were the number of rounds and what happened in those rounds? The first round is very important, right?
Because a lot of people apply and the shortlisting process must be very tough. So, what was the first round and what was the shortlisting process of the first round according to you? Okay, so the first round was you have to submit your idea, you have to submit your problem and what solution you are coming up with.
And the second thing was you have to submit a two-minute video of... what your solution is and you have to upload it somewhere on the YouTube and you have to create a publicly accessible link and you have to submit that in round 1. So the judging criteria for this round was the innovation and the creativity of the solution, what was its technical feasibility and what impact and benefit would it give to the Walmart and again quality of proof and the concept and the demo, they were judging on these basis. Thank you.
You need to submit this idea in the form of a presentation or text or just fill it out on their website. How did you submit this? For round 1, it was just text. You have to submit your idea, problem and solution only on text.
And in video, you have to present it entirely. And at that time, you didn't have to make any prototype. You just had to submit the idea and video, right?
No. Here you have to make a proper solution and show that solution in your video You have to show the prototype Whatever you made you have to present that in the video I will give the link to that last year video also in the description You can go and check that out so that you can understand what type of video they made last year And you have a better understanding After that once you have shortlisted right? After that what were the other rounds? Okay after this after all submissions only 8 teams will be selected and they will directly reach the grand jury round and grand jury round is a similar process where you have to pitch you get 3 minutes to do the pitch then you get 2 minutes to again pitch the video and then you have 10 minutes of Q&A session where all your judges are going to ask you questions and then you have to give answers based on that and After this round, they finally decide the winners, right? After this round gets finished, after 10 days, you'll get a mail that top 3 teams have been selected.
You still don't know who 1st, 2nd, 3rd is. They're gonna announce the 1st, 2nd, 3rd winners in the Converse event. After that, this was done, you were announced as the 1st winner.
And how long after that did you get to know that you got an internship here? Okay, in the Converge event, we got to know that we were the first team. And for summer internship, we got to know after 3-4 months. So the results were announced, I guess on, let me check.
Yes, so the winners were announced on September 20th. But we got to know about a selection for summer internship around in January. It's important, Jesus, that students are confused. Many people are taking part in hackathon for the first time, so making a team is a difficult task for them.
So what should be your thought process while building a team for such a competition? Okay, so first of all you have to think about some idea. Like what is your idea, whatever you have to present in the hackathon. It depends on how you are going to plan out the team formation.
So let's say if you are planning on building a website. So then you have to build a team in which they know the tech stack that you have to implement. Let's say for website you have to implement frontend, backend. So the qualifications of those teammates, the tech stack that should be there should be that tech stack basically. Just about the idea, they have four themes I guess.
Those four themes, what is the correct theme and what... should be the project idea, you were there in the finals right, so you must know what type of projects were selected by people there and what was your project, so if people can get an idea, so with that type of thought process, they can think right, so there were four themes, one was data, one was supply chain, emerging tech and future of retail so the theme we chose was emerging tech and there were other solutions too, like someone was working on the logistics Someone was working on the LLM, creating a chatbot for the inventory management, and some were working on the RFID implementing in the logistics part. But for us, it was an XR solution that we went with. What was this solution doing? Our solution was Walmart specific and if you go to the e-commerce website or Walmart store there are many products which are unassembled and when you purchase them and bring them home you have to assemble them which is a very tedious task so the normal methods which is reading the manual or watching a YouTube video you refer it and you start assembling the product but we replaced it with our XR solution where we implemented webXR and through this what the user will be able to see let's say if he is wearing some AR glasses or maybe he has a phone through which he will scan a QR code on the product box and then he will be led to an XR scene where in front of him he will have an unassembled product assembly there will be unassembled products in 3D and he will be having floating buttons over here which is step 1, step 2 and step 3 and if he clicks on the step 1 button then in augmented reality view the assembly animations will play so here he can actually assemble the product and with their glasses on they can view the assembly animations on the left virtual animations in our time if there is some D2C company then mostly AR VR solution gets the highlight because generally AR VR solutions are very less so might be an edge going forward if there is an AR VR solution But still, different types of project ideas we will discuss.
But I will take some of the project ideas that Chirag saw last time, I will put them in a document and I will maybe give you that sheet in the description of this video or in the telegram group you can join that. So you can go and check that out. You will get to know about some ideas on which type of idea you have to work. Right?
You can take some hint from that. I am not saying that you have to give the same idea. You need to take a hint, you need to pivot that idea and then you need to present. Right?
So you will get the direction from that how to think. That is very very important. Chirag, after that you got an intern. How much stipend does Walmart give for one month for SD intern?
Okay, for Walmart, one month stipend is 1 lakh rupees. Apart from this, there are other benefits also. You get 14 days of hotel stay and you also get the flight sponsored. Like coming from your hometown and going back to your hometown, those flights are also sponsored. So you got that 1 lakh per month.
internship after this particular and your entire team got the same? yeah my entire entire team got the same. Got it and any final piece of advice because first round is very very important right first round is the maximum shortlisting so any final piece of advice for people who are applying for this who are unsure, who are underconfident, who are thinking of applying or not, if you want to say anything? See apply to sabi ko karna chahiye like you should definitely go and try this these hackathons out there and who knows ki tum select ho jao for the final jury round same happened with us also hume bilkul hume bhot unsure the like we should participate or not hume idea submit karna chahiye ki nahi karna chahiye but still we reached the grand jury round and we got the first prize so starting me bilkul idea nahi hota hai but you start when you start working on it definitely when you are uske baare mein tum research karte ho you get a more clarity and you can come up with a better solution which Walmart might like.
Final piece of advice, don't keep your idea too generalised. You target a big idea and then you're working on it. In our case, we kept our idea very niche. And we just fixated to that and how we implemented it and how we just solved the problem specific to Walmart. and how you have added business aspects to it.
These all things matter. Apart from this, the uniqueness also matters. How unique is your project?
Like, let's say Walmart employees Google your project and they found something, then no, you will get less points. But if they Google it and they don't find any similar solution out there or something which is very unique, then yes, you can get extra points. So, the project should be unique and you should think from that lens. You should be very specific and not a generic product. You should find a specific problem and give a solution to it.
Apart from this, you built that entire solution. Is it something that is coming in public or will Walmart use it as a solution? Do you have that idea?
Yeah, definitely. You should know that the exact department in Walmart is only in California. And they were actually working on this project so what i believe they organize this hackathon so that they can get to know about the ideas and they can actually start working on them.
So definitely Walmart is going to work on this. Thank you so much. I think it was a very insightful video and people got to know a lot about this competition.
There was very little information available. That's why I wanted somebody who has done that should come and tell about it. But yeah, that was it. Thank you so much, Chirag, for coming here, sharing your journey. It was amazing talking to you.
and still if you have any doubts anything you want to ask please do let me know in the comments below i'll get it done through chidag or i'll answer it in the comments below and you can get your queries but still the end result or the end uh insight is you should definitely go ahead and participate you never know you can be the winner also thank you so much and see you in some another video till then all the best good luck and bye