Business Opens Branch On Campus
Bridging the gap between college and industry: Zendit Ltd co-founder Steve Wexelstein (second from right) and Nathan Payne, also of Zendit Ltd, at Dundee College along with the students who are working with the company.
Release date: 23/03/2012
Dundee College is breaking new ground in terms of working closely with industry.
While further education establishments across the country continuously strive to keep abreast of developments in industry to ensure students are trained in the most up-to-date techniques, Dundee College has taken this a step further by actually having a leading software development company open a studio on campus.
Dunfermline based company, Zendit Ltd, which specialises in developing mobile, web and social applications, maintains a very pro education attitude and is keen to forge closer links with education.
Founder and chief technology officer Steve Wexelstein and Simon Hewitt, curriculum manager computer studies at Dundee College, have been working together in a bid to support and allow Zendit to ‘give something back’ to education.
The resultant project has seen Zendit open a development base at the brand new Gardyne Campus employing eight students as interns working on a ‘live’ project to develop a new mobile service for smart-phone, tablet and desktop browser users by summer time.
“Zendit will have at least one member of staff working here each week and sometimes more,” commented Lorna Reith, head of the Centre for Creative and Digital Industries at the college.
“It isn’t only the students who are gaining from this experience, Zendit staff are also on campus helping with college staff development.”
A total of eight HND software development students are involved in the live project.
“We had 46 students keen to become involved in this project and had to filter this down to eight,” explained Simon.
“They now work in office space created at Gardyne, specially for this team.”
“Students are taking part in this project in addition to their course work – testing the skills they learn in a real-life setting.”
This internship project is the first of its kind in the software development industry in the country and the first time that Dundee College have had a properly-structured internship programme of this scale based on campus.
While the project plan is to have all the development work on the service completed by the end of the academic year, Zendit hope to take on up to four of the eight students involved in paid employment over the summer.
It is not just the students who are benefitting from this initiative, Zendit jumped at the chance to give their staff managerial experience working with students.
“Together we must ensure that learners are given the right experience and opportunity to prepare them for the demands for employment,” commented Steven Wexelstein.
“We feel strongly about guiding them in the next generation of skills that will give them the best chance of future success.”