Xomidhan, Assam’s first online career counseling NGO, takes its next big step towards helping the youth of India’s North East with a mentorship program. Flagged off on October 1, 2016, this one-on-one mentorship program is in association with AKADEMIC, a program run by the Assam Foundation of North America (AFNA), where meritorious but economically underprivileged students from Assam are provided with scholarships. Xomidhan has selected nine of those scholarship holders to flag off their first ever mentorship program.

“We have been career counseling students for over six years now. Today, we are over 300 subject matter experts’ strong organization and an initiative in the lines of scholarship cum mentorship has always been in our minds as the next logical step. So, when AFNA floated the idea, we were happy to collaborate,” says Ankush Kuhar, who is leading the Mentorship Program along with Nidarshana Saikia Das, co-founder of Xomidhan. They are being supported by Xomidhan’s core team members as well as co-founders Manjit Nath and Amar Jyoti Saikia.

“We are proud to have some brilliant domain experts from diverse disciplines join us for this program. Not all of them have been assigned mentees as yet because we want to start small, focus on quality rather than quantity. As we progress, we hope to improve on our framework, expand and make significant and measurable impact,” Nidarshana adds.

For the program, in its first edition, it has initiated with 8 mentors who will provide focused and dedicated guidance to a mentee each, respectively. The list of mentors includes Ullas Kumar(Indian Railway Personnel Service), Satyakam Dutta (Assistant Commissioner at Income Tax Department), Ibu Sanjeeb Garg(Asst. Commisioner, Income Tax, New Delhi), Payal Agarwal (Consultant- Taxation at CII, New Delhi), Bikash Ranjan Das (Research and Development Engineer at Imagineering, Inc., Aviation & Aerospace - Japan), Kavita Jitani (Advocate and Legal Consultant, New Delhi), Bidyut Bikash Goswami (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Mathematics & Statistics, University of Victoria, Canada), Biswajit Dutta (Assistant Manager, Godrej & Boyce Mfg Co Ltd), Poonam Agarwal(Pursuing PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from University of Texas at Austin., TX.), Manjil Saikia (M.Sc, Mathematics, Tezpur University; Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Vienna)

These mentors will be guiding students in their respective areas of expertise such as cracking Civil Services examination, getting through different foreign universities, building a career in banking, mathematics, robotics, astrophysics, aviation and aerospace, industrial design, photojournalism or in the field of research and development. “With regards to our future initiatives, we are planning to provide Resume Writing Services as well as Psychometric Test to the students at minimal cost”, mentions Anshuman Dutta who leads, PR and Marketing at Xomidhan.