When Covid-19 caused a drop-off in internship opportunities for Wintec IT students this year, Alison Marshall, the Centre for Information Technology Industry Relationship Manager, came up with The Gig.
The Gig is a ‘MakerLab’ that can be operated virtually, run by the Wintec Centre for Information Technology. Like a business, it has real clients, and students have the opportunity to gain industry experience through a time of uncertainty.
“The Gig is run as a real IT company. We’ve got clients, and we’ve got students from our Masters, Postgraduate and Bachelor of Applied IT programmes all working together,” Marshall says.
“I’m the director, and we’ve got two of our Wintec staff working there too – Heather Maitland as agile coach and Alex Yu as technical lead. We give the students industry roles such as scrum masters, engineers, business analysts and a security consultant.”
Clients can test out early-stage ideas and experiment with them.
“When Covid-19 hit, all of our students had to go virtual,” Marshall says. “We could see with the potential economic downturn that there would be a drop off in internships available. I thought that if we had to stay working in a virtual environment, there would continue to be opportunities for those students.”
The Gig has provided internships for students, and a space to ensure those students are getting technical guidance throughout their projects.
“Students appreciate getting real-world experience through working with these clients,” says Marshall.
Student Vinod Gupta was one of the students involved with The Gig’s pilot programme. He says that through The Gig he “got a huge amount of professional experience”.
“I learned fundamental skills and applications, as well as professional and interpersonal skills like customer negotiation, client relationships and working in high pressure environments.”
The clients students worked with included from not-for-profit Healing Innovation Hub, who were trialling virtual reality apps to teach rangatahi (youth) about mental health and wellbeing; ThrillCapital, a sports funding company that hopes to start a global online racing competition using VR car simulation; and a start-up that wanted help creating an IoT device and mobile application called aimed at simplifying processes in the testing and tagging industry.
