This is a guest post by Husnain, a Babson College student who interned at the ICON Foundation’s San Francisco office during the summer of 2019. 

I remember sitting on the 11th floor of our office in my suit — feeling excited, out of place, anxious, as if I didn’t belong here. Where I’m from, you don’t get an opportunity to work for a blockchain company. So even though I had never been to California and didn’t know anyone in San Francisco, I decided to come here and avail this amazing opportunity that I had been offered. From the very first day at ICON, everyone welcomed me as a member of the team and genuinely expected me to make a contribution.

During my first week, I was offered to choose what I wanted to do for my main project. Being from Babson College, which is the number one school for entrepreneurship, I decided that entrepreneurship would be my focus during the course of my internship. I thus started exploring different problems and finding ways in which blockchain could solve them. 

Project: Pakistan

While researching, I stumbled upon Pakistan’s problem of fake credentials/degrees. I realized that this could possibly be solved by issuing certificates on the blockchain. I discussed this with the ICON team and discovered that they had a product called “broof”, the perfect solution to this problem. 

After discovering this service, I started working on strategies on how to integrate this in Pakistan. I thought pitching to universities would be a good way to do it, but unfortunately I received no response from them. Instead, I was able to connect with Pakistan’s largest job hunting platform with over 6.3 million users, Rozee.pk, and now we are trying to integrate broof on their platform. Rozee also has good relations with educational institutions in Pakistan. With them, we could integrate ‘broof’ in the Pakistani educational industry and revolutionize it. 

 A journey full of learning opportunities

When I started my internship, I thought I knew everything there was about blockchain. But little did I know how much more I would learn by actually working for ICON. This whole experience was like working on my own business as I was the one solely responsible for its outcome, but of course the ICON team was always there when I needed help. Working alongside professionals like Min, Ricky, Scott & Daeki has taught me a lot.

Throughout my internship journey, I have witnessed the ICON team working really hard towards a hyperconnected world and by looking at their efforts, I am confident that ICX will moon. Now that I’m leaving ICON, I feel like I have much more knowledge about the industry, the ins and outs of a tech startup and how to have fun and work at the same time. 

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