We Turned a School Holiday Into Our Own Office

In Rwanda's technical secondary schools, students in the fourth level do an internship during the holidays. It is a month long: two weeks of the regular holiday combined with two weeks provided by RTB, the institution that manages technical education.

Most students treat it as a requirement to get through. I decided to treat it as a chance to build something.

The decision

We had just come back from the hackathon in Kigali, and the internship was about to begin. Before it started, I gathered a group of classmates and made a proposal: instead of scattering for the month, let's live together in Kigali and work on our own project.

Nobody gave us permission, and nobody offered us an office. So we made one. In Gasabo district we rented two houses, one to live in and one to use as our office, and paid the rent for the month in advance.

That was where the project got its name. We called it EduBridge, a system to predict which students were at risk of dropping out of school.

What we took to RTB

By the end of the month, we took the idea to RTB, accompanied by a teacher, with more of our team joining for the presentation. It went well, in the sense that nobody told us the idea was bad. But we brought an idea and some early prototypes, not the thing itself. We did not yet have a model that could predict whether a student would leave school.

RTB said they liked the idea but weren't convinced we were the right group to carry it forward. They said they'd tell us about future collaboration. They never did.

What I did next

When the next term started, I kept working on it. That was the part I could actually control, so I put my effort there. Over that term I built the model that predicts the probability of a student dropping out, based on many independent factors.

I did not stop, even without a reply. Looking back, I think that was the most important decision in the whole story.

What I learned

You can build your own structure. A holiday looks like a gap, or a requirement. It can be a workspace if you decide it is. What we had was a month, a few determined people and a place to work, and that was enough to start.

Show the hard part. We presented an idea, not the core of it. If I did this again, I would build the difficult piece first, the model itself, before asking anyone to believe in it. An idea is easy to admire and easy to forget.

Silence is not a verdict. RTB never came back to us. It would have been easy to read that as a no and quit. Institutions move on their own time, and their silence says very little about whether the work is worth doing.

Small, committed teams move fast. A shared house and a shared goal meant every decision happened within hours. I have been chasing that speed ever since.

Why I still think about it

EduBridge is behind me now. It is part of my story and not part of what I am building today. But the instinct behind it, creating the conditions for the work rather than waiting for them, is the same instinct behind ATAS.