Career guidance for 1st year engineering students

First year of B.Tech feels like school again: physics, maths, a workshop lab, and a lot of people telling you placements are “far away.” They are not far. What you do in year one decides how easy year three feels.

This post is a simple first year engineering roadmap: what to learn, what to skip, which internship or training makes sense, and how Excelrs helps first-year students in Jharkhand and beyond.

What first year is for

Three jobs. Nothing more.

1. Pass cleanly. A backlog in year one follows you into every placement form.
2. Learn to make one small thing on a computer. A web page. A tiny Python script. Anything you can open and show.
3. Start a public record. A profile, a GitHub account, one certificate you can verify online.

You do not need to pick “AI or web or data” yet. You need to stop being afraid of the keyboard.

First year is not for choosing a career. It is for getting comfortable building small things.

What to learn, month by month

Branch does not matter much here. Mechanical, civil, electrical, CSE, ECE — everyone gains from HTML, a little Python, and a habit of finishing things.

The first-year summer internship or training

Many colleges ask for a summer internship or industrial training certificate after the first year. Students search for “internship for 1st year engineering students” and find long lists of paid PDFs with no work behind them.

A useful first-year training has three things:

• live classes, not only videos
• a small project you submit
• a certificate with your name, dates, and a link anyone can check

That is the bar. If a program cannot show you a sample certificate and a sample project, skip it.

How Excelrs helps first-year students

Excelrs is the training and internship platform run by Lawazia Tech from Dumka, Jharkhand. Dumka Engineering College has worked with us since 2022.

For first year, the reference track is HTML & CSS. In summer 2026 the HTML & CSS training ran from 1 June to 15 July with 367 students enrolled — the biggest batch we have run. Students built pages, submitted them, and got a certificate they can verify at excelrs.dev/certificate.

What you get on a campus batch:

• an enrollment letter when you pay, with an Excelrs registration number
• live sessions and tasks on the workshop page
• a project you submit, not a quiz you guess
• a certificate with your dates, checkable online
• a score that shows on the Excelrs leaderboard

All tracks for every year are on the campus program page. Fees and dates are on each training page.

One honest note: the Excelrs certificate is not issued by AICTE. Colleges accept it because it comes with real work, a verify link, and co-branding where the college asks for it.

Three small things by the end of year one. That is a strong start.

What students from earlier batches did

Open the Excelrs profiles page. You will see Dumka Engineering College students like Varsha Kumari and Atul Kumar Rawani. They started with trainings and later built real features on live apps — stock cards on a kitchen app, quiz screens on a quiz app.

Nobody starts there. Everyone on that page started with something as small as an HTML page.

Common first-year mistakes

Waiting for third year to “start coding.” Then you are learning basics while others are interviewing.

Collecting ten certificates with no project. Recruiters open one link, not ten PDFs.

Copying a project from YouTube line by line. You will not be able to explain it in a viva.

Ignoring English and communication. A clear two-line message to a mentor is a skill.

Skipping the summer. Two months of nothing is the easiest gap to fix and the most common.

Your first-year checklist

• No backlog at the end of the year.
• One web page about you, online.
• One small Python or C program you wrote yourself.
• A GitHub account with that code.
• One training with a verifiable certificate.
• An Excelrs profile (free to create at excelrs.dev/signup).

If one box is empty, that is your summer plan.

Questions first-year students ask

Is first year too early for an internship? No. A short training with a project is the right size. A real company internship can wait for year two or three.

Which language should I learn first in B.Tech? HTML and CSS to see results fast, then Python. Your syllabus language (often C) is fine too.

I am from mechanical or civil. Is this for me? Yes. Every branch now uses computers. A page and a small script help any engineer.

Does a certificate get me a job? No certificate does. A project and a profile help you get the interview.

Programs you can join

These are open on Excelrs right now, plus the summer track most first-year students take.

Free to use: make a profile on the Excelrs leaderboard and collect points from every training, and watch the hackathons page for the next event. The AI Agent Internship is easier if you already write a little Python.

Not sure which one fits? Message the team below before you pay. We will tell you honestly if a program is too early or too late for you.

Talk to the Excelrs team

Not sure where to start? Ask us. We reply to students directly.

• WhatsApp or call: +91 98331 89399
• Email: info@excelrs.dev
• Office: Lawazia Tech, Dumka — college batches can visit
• Make your profile: excelrs.dev/signup

If you are a faculty member or T&P officer, the campus program page shows how a college batch works.

Next in this series: what to do in second year of engineering.