My Academic and Entrepreneurial Journey : By – Sayli Pandit

Entrepreneurial outreach through social media. As a young designer, I truly believe in reaching out to people to explain my concepts and products.

It began with the lockdown, where I started with my art page ‘Blue Palette’. In the beginning, it wasn't really difficult to manage the academics with my page, since we were almost done with the semester and hence had plenty of time to create new freestyles. In this process of balancing the academics and the page together, I realised that in one way or the other I’m reflecting my assignment ideas onto my other creativity. It later became difficult when I started with my specialisation year [2nd year]. Being a product design student I was very much fascinated towards achieving different forms and different techniques, which more or less started reflecting up in my art page work. I started analysing my sketches in a different and in a more technical aspect which helped me grow as a learner in this field. I started with 200 followers on the page and today I have reached 2k [2000]. I also started with a YouTube channel, having 139 subscribers.

Chair design in the material studio. Stress was on experimentation of forms through limitation of materials.

The interactive videos that are shown to us during our class hours about eco-friendly material use and also sometimes the videos about local artisans and their skills encouraged me to create something feasible and eco-friendly as well.

I even got the opportunity to sell my designs on an app named ‘RedBubble’.

In this process of learning and experiencing new styles and exploring new platforms, I have grabbed many opportunities as possible.The college has been very supportive towards everything I do, the faculty has been keenly showing interest in every other non- academic venture I do. For ex: Recently I have been taking paid workshops in collaboration with an online organisation ‘Upside Me’ working for women empowerment.