Helping dreams soar

Sneha Saptasagar from Bengaluru spent her formative years struggling with circumstances. Her family of three was dependent on her father’s meagre income from agriculture, barely INR 10,000 a month. Sneha’s mother was a homemaker who had studied only till 12th. Notwithstanding their low income, her father urged her to study well and fly high. To see his daughter shine, he had even taken bank loans to support her education costs.

From an early age, Sneha showed tremendous strength of personality. A school topper till class 10, she won the ‘Best Student’ of the batch accolade, and actively participated in inter-school competitions that won her recognition. After school, she wrote the Karnataka Common Entrance Test for college admission where she secured a high rank of 2,592 from among the tens of thousands of applicants.

Sneha joined Bangalore Institute of Technology to study for BTech with Computer Science and Engineering. Once she enrolled in college, she came to know about the Foundation For Excellence Scholarship, which provides support to financially constrained students who wish to pursue higher education programmes in India.

FFE is a partner of Capgemini for its scholarship and the Big Buddy mentoring programs.

The FFE scholarship helped Sneha both financially and emotionally. “It meant that my family need not go around asking for money from relatives or banks,” she says. “Moreover, FFE has enriched and encouraged me in many ways, by conducting programmes that helped my personal and professional development.”

As part of FFE’s ‘Beyond Scholarship Program’, students undergo application-based remote training aimed towards employability. Based on Sneha’s initial baseline assessment, she completed the English training, Aptitude training and Hi-Touch Advanced English courses. She says, “My educational journey would have been incomplete without the support of FFE. The entire programme has been informative as it provided well-rounded education, including life and career readiness skills, beyond the regular academic curriculum. I feel more focused and confident of my abilities.”

Sneha’s dream journey now sees her placed at Tejas Networks with an annual salary of INR 800,000.
She is thankful to her parents and mentors for being her source of support and inspiration through good times and bad. “With my salary, I want first to support my family and then help other needy students,” she says.