Cohort 9 mentee

During the period of March 2025 to November 2025, I was honored to be among the 40 kamiLimu cohort 9 mentees, a rigorous and fun mentorship program where mediocrity is treated as a crisis and feedback taken as a love language (Do not say it is an 8 month structured mentorship program for tech students I warned you or else Dr. Chao will be on your neck).

Over the eight months🤦🏼‍♂️(I had to), I got to participate in the mentorship’s competition on the following categories;

• Public speaking
• Scholraship essay writing and presentation.
• Innovation project development and pitching
• Professional Development (Where a mock job is advertised and mentees get to apply for it like a normal person does via submitting Resumes and after screening of the resumes by the instructors few mentees who qualify then are taken through a mock interview and the ones who win mean they were selected for the position).

The innovation projects were based on the ICT tracks mentees got to choose for training, I was in the cybsecurity track. I was able to reach the finals in the public speaking, scholarship essay writing and presentation and innovation project development and pitching competitions. Moreover, together with my innovation project team, we got to win the innovation competition by developing and pitching our product Helbme, a simple web app meant to help students to verify Helb text messages if they are legitimate or scam by taking a whole screenshot of the entire message containing the sender ID and the content of the message.The pitching was done in front of a panel of industry experts. Below is the repo to the project featuring documentation, pitch deck, and source code.

chirongaA/helbme

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During the finals of the scholarship competition, we were required to come up with an artifact that answers the following question.

We invite you to step into the role of future leaders of KamiLimu. 
Imagine that you are leading KamiLimu in a world of endless resources. 
Design a hybrid artifact (combining tech and non-tech elements) that answers the following questions collectively: 
a) What leadership philosophy would guide you? 
b) What bold new direction(s) would you take, KamiLimu? 
c) How would your leadership choices impact mentees, mentors, alumni, and the broader tech ecosystem?

Your creative artifact must combine both tech (digital tools, prototypes, videos, apps, interactive media, etc.) and non-tech (storytelling, physical models, art, etc.) elements. The artifact should be original and reflect your authentic leadership perspective.

Below was the answer I gave to the question, althoguh I was not able to win the competion, I got to earn the skills on how to write a good scholarship essay which to me is a win still :).

During the graduation I was recognised not only for good innovation project development and pitching skills alongside my team but also as the most improved male mentee in Cohort 9 for demonstrating outstanding growth across the program’s key focus areas.