I despised this trend when I was in college and did not know the value of  internships either. Most people I knew were outsourcing or buying projects or interns

I despised this trend when I was in college and did not know the value of  internships either. Most people I knew were outsourcing or buying projects or internship certificates to have more time for what they wanted to do after college - MBA, MS etc. Me and my friend knew 8051 assembly language before project frenzy started. We wanted to stay away from outsourcing project sellers and build something on our own. There was a senior who'd built a Robotic arm to show it was possible. Our major was in Electronics and communications engineering. We built a GPS vehicle locator by making two GSM phones talk to each other using SMS. It even had a maps front-end in VB. Nothing I had learnt in College prepared us for what we did in those 3 months. We took printouts of 8051 microcontroller, GPS module, Nokia, Siemens modem datasheets. We spent lot of time researching GPS modules which we could get in Bangalore and after numerous visits to circuit shops, setup a lab at home for soldering and burning microcontroller ROM. We burned code in 8051 ROM like 200+ times and spent the whole time learning soldering, writing modular code in Embedded C, talking to Siemens AT modems. When we finally got SMS response of GPS coordinates, we had 600 lines of Embedded C code. We started writing the client side in VB which was a breeze except for soldering a Nokia phone to COM port. We got the same grades as those who bought their projects, but we had the satisfaction of building something. College in India is pretty much useless unless you have great peers. I was fortunate to have a liberal education in school where the focus was on learning and not rote memorization. I learnt assembly, gwbasic, C, VB while in school. My friend got a job in Embedded systems industry. I applied for GPS and fleet mgmt software companies but ended up working for a big IT company. I got out of that soon and joined a place where developers are not treated like commodities.