As with all good things, my journey with the Polygon Fellowship started with LinkedIn (yes I'm cringing), after I read about it on a post by Dalip Tyagi.

Today we announced the launch of Polygon Fellowship: Class of 2022. The program is designed to help participants with education, funding, mentorship, and support with a wide range of aspects related to the rapidly evolving Web3 industry.

Application deadline June 1, 2022. https://t.co/0r6O8hiks1

— Dalip Tyagi (@dtyagi) May 18, 2022

After learning that the event was being organized by Devfolio, I decided to register. In case you were wondering, yes, I do love the guys at Devfolio, sue me. I wasn't expecting to make the shortlist, especially because it was such a big event with an offline aspect as well. To my surprise, I found this in my inbox a few days after registering.

This was among the few nice things that happened to me over the summer since I had a terrible time adjusting to Bangalore, when I was there for my internship at Honeywell. Not to mention the immense ego boost that came with the fact that I was among 25 other fellows who were selected out of 10,000 applicants.

The First Seven Weeks The beginner track was structured so that we could get a holistic taste of what Web3 is and where we could contribute as developers migrating from traditional Web2 technologies. This meant getting us to explore several domains, and every week, we were introduced to a new niche in web3:

• Week1: Intro to Blockchain
• Week2: Smart Contracts
• Week3: DeFi
• Week4: Infrastructre and Storage
• Week5: DAOs
• Week6: NFTs & Metaverse
• Week7: Project PRD

The seven weeks weren't just about the study material and tasks, and boy was there a shitton of them (cough, we told you so Aniket, cough). I got to meet a bunch of people during the fun sessions like movie nights and game nights. They really helped us fellows start bonding even during online sessions. The tasks also served a social purpose as they proved to be a pretty convenient icebreaker.

We also had quite a few sessions where prominent people in web3 showed up and spoke about the products that they were shipping and gave us insights into their industries as well.

The HackerHouse The hackerhouse was held in The Paul Bangalore, and from the entrance all the way to the bathrooms, everything was just Oh So Fancy. I remember telling Jayesh from the fellowship that the place is so fancy, it made me feel poor the entire time I was there.

Drooling about the venue aside, I got to meet a ton of people from both the Builder and Beginner tracks, got to speak with a few speakers that I had seen previously in just hackathon meets such as Piyush Maheshwari, Sushmit and a bunch of others. Even within the Hackerhouse, I met some people from Polygon and people associated with them such as Manish Pandey and Mukund Jha.

There were a lot of midnight sessions where Akash Shukla would invite important people and just put them in front of us - to pitch our ideas to, get feedback, or just chat with them in general. These sessions were extremely insightful and brought a lot of perspective to our discussions about web3 products. With that said, the merch was incentive in itself to attend the sessions (not the only incentive - or was it?).

My core memory from the Hackerhouse was building our projects along side with our fellows sipping terribly bitter cold brew (no one told me we had to dilute them), and just vibing while struggling to complete the work before demo day.

Demo Day This was supposed to be the result of 8 weeks of sweat and blood - yes, I am being dramatic, what gave it away? We got to pitch to a panel of VCs like folks from Sino Global, Pareen from Builders tribe and Romit from Lightspeed Ventures. We received really helpful feedback on the look of our product, feasibility and the possible market demand for the product.

Say GM to Panchayat, an engagement platform for DAOs by @yangit69 & @ShubhamKukretii!

Their 2d metaverse will have:
✅ Engagement activities
✅ Audio & Video chat
✅ Token gated sections of the map

👉 https://t.co/xQaEwum678 pic.twitter.com/G58LdsBE1G

— Devfolio (@devfolio) August 7, 2022

Wrapping Up

Overall, I really loved the entire experience, and I am really grateful to the folks at Devfolio and Polygon for conducting such an amazing event. Special mention for the Gawky Goose, Bangalore for hosting the after party!