Our Startng Experience - Team Moscow 

For most of us, our startng journey began with a tweet from Mark Essien of Hotels.ng. Uncle Mark had done a great job with hotels.ng securing international investment of about $1.5 million for the company, so when Uncle Mark speaks, we listen. However, there is nothing in a caterpillar that tells it, it's going to be a butterfly - this has been our experience at Team Moscow.

In the beginning, many of us joined to just see what this techy people do, I mean it would be cool to be one of them and may be have a start up too someday. Some of us joined with the plan to just coast along and get the grades and get to the glorious main internship; then there was the select few of us, the Professors who saw this as a money heist, they came prepared and their goal was to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or at the very least claim the $1 million reward put up by Apple for anyone who could hack the new iPhone. 

When the doors to pre-internship finally opened, Chaos!!! Everyone  was rattled. It was 10,000 voices wanting to be heard at the same time. Rules? What rules? We broke and tore up everyone of them, if they were landmines, we would all be dead by now, even the control room with all our precious mentors would not have been spared. But our mentors - the elders, led by President xyluz, are so wise, they had done this for 5 seasons and expected our barbaric behaviour, so they took us out before we killed ourselves and then some semblance of calm returned. This was the hunger games and the mentors watched with glee from the control room. 

The first ones to land on their feet were the Professors, the most skilled of us who wanted to impress the elders by all means and just kept throwing in all the wrong terms much to the amazement of our elders who in their wisdom helped quel all our confusion and taught us just the right thing to set us going again. The crispy newbies came in tiptoeing around, cautious not to expose that they didn't honestly understand what in God's name we were to work on - they would have asked for a refund, but the programme is free, sigh. We also had stabilizers, some of us who came in ready to contribute sweat and sleep to move forward.

By the end of Task 2, the elders threw in a surprise! 120 of you will now become Team Moscow and work as a group! This was great news to the newbies who were glad for the cover of a team and sad news for the Professors who wondered how to carry everyone else along but again we declare our elders are wise for this is what they did - Although, we were now a group, we still had individual tasks and the group could not be graded without the submissions of all the individual tasks. No one could hide and we were forced to work together and help one another for the greater good.

There was no way we were going to transfer chaos into our brand new Team Moscow, so first, we elected team leads, that was one thing everyone agreed on at least - order. Brethren, once we had order, the magic began, we were able to work together to birth our group project, ANCORA - A nonprofit organisation that provides education to less privileged children through support from individuals, corporations, government and international organisations.

From the front end, to the backend, and all its complexities to the flutterwave api to the different time zones and then the sleepless nights, oh the sleepless nights we all endured; our able team lead ensured to get the group buy-in to ensure we were all carried along.

We worked tirelessly and seamlessly as a group and also individually, it was like a perfectly coordinated orchestra, can you hear the harmony?

As the doors close to pre-internship, we have no idea what the future of internship holds but the privilege of being a part of something great is an experience we will never forget. 

Thank you Flutterwave, Startng and HngInternship.