Sadia Kabir Dina experienced her first IoT job attachment

As the globe is moving towards development, IoT is the most driving issue that increases efficiency and effectiveness in the existing system. Most of the developing countries are adopting this Internet of Things where Bangladesh is lagging behind. Our ignorance about IoT surprised Sadia Kabir Dina, a student of Computer Science and Engineering of Rajshahi University of Engineering Technology. It aroused her interest in IoT and determined her to contribute in this sector. She started her first job attachment in Inovace- which is one of the latest tech startups in Bangladesh, focusing on IT sector, especially on embedded systems design- software development; and relentlessly working on the advancement of IoT in our country.

“I made a decision to contribute somehow in establishing the impacts of IoT in Bangladesh and for that the very first job was to educate myself and be compatible to do some better”.

Before engaging with this job attachment, Sadia has worked on organizing workshops, helping other students making prototypes and so on. She with her two friends wrote their first ever up-to the mark book in Bengali on arduino in 2018. This book was written for making Arduino easier to learn for the teens; which will eventually make IoT familiar among the youth to explore.

 “You know, when you plan to make some new concepts easier to the folks, you need to make enough resources available that are both informative and easy”.

The attachment started in the last half of Ramadan when she was on her vacation. On the first day, she was welcomed by the Managing Director of Inovace. There are four departments in that company. With them Sadia spent her most of the time at the Research and Development department as she thought this was the core of that team. She observed the total work flow from this department and tried to understand their working procedure.

“Any updates from the production are first served here. After that, R&D troubleshooting, analyzing the problem, solving it or giving directions back to them. They suggest necessary upgradation to the software and business department too. On the whole, it seemed to be a perfect bridge among all its branches”.

Team Inovace

During the attachment, I came to know about their-

• products,
• raw materials,
• manufacturing,
• circulation,
• working procedures,
• team management,
• component selection,
• business models,
• firmware and PCB designing,
• system monitoring,
• pricing and revenue,
• policies,
• marketing and branding,
• distributed research and
• Most importantly the challenges they are facing right now!

She asked frequent questions after she was served the details of each components which they used making their products. Sadia thought herself that designing a product and planning to make it great, she needed to understand each of its steps with WHY and WHY NOT?

From the very day she joined them, she knew how to research over a thing with beta testing, how any slight mistakes could affect in PCB designs, how to adapt any new technologies on older versions, how to minimize the loss and so on. Apart from the hardware part, she learned a huge amount of stuffs regarding business models, marketing and mass production. She got a chance to be familiar with the functions of stm 32 and LoRa, as they were doing research on these for the betterment.

“Before joining them, the concept of MQTT and NB-IoT was null to me though it is going to be great soon! I think this is the best part of this attachment that I can work and research over thing with proper guidance anytime beside me”.

She was overwhelmed with satisfaction when she started to express her feelings about her very first job attachment. She said, “This is a challenging factor to work in this environment where people are not easy to IoT products and not ready for paying this to get a better service or lifestyle than this. In this case, though the team dreams for any better service than existing products, they cannot think of going to any mass production”.  She added, “in the attachment what a student want the most is to get the vibes of workplace by working hand-on, learn new things to implement and get the experience that will last long to apply in his/her career. I’ve achieved all these in Inovace along with the opportunity to meet a bunch of talented people and a great team”.

She denoted the importance of having an internship opportunity from student life as it is a great initiative to thrive towards the goal of career. She said, “we should engage ourselves more with these attachments or join as an interns or make our own startups with IoT. ‘Cause it’s time to go on the battle and fight to conquer for the best!