Co-Coordinating the 1st Ever Internship Program at Orange Digital Center
1-Month Intensive Full-Stack (MERN) Development Bootcamp for 20 Interns
On 8 August 2023, days after completing his BTech in Software Engineering, Nfor Nde Nyambi stood in front of 20 interns, university leadership, and three co-founders to launch something that had never existed at the University of Buea before: a structured, full-stack internship program hosted at the Orange Digital Center (ODC).
Building the Program from Scratch:
Rather than stepping directly into the job market, Nfor chose to co-design and co-coordinate a one-month intensive bootcamp centered on the MERN stack, MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.js, built from the ground up alongside three fellow colleagues. As one of the team leads, he supervised a cohort of interns through the complete product cycle: idea validation, project selection, and hands-on development of a working digital solution.
Mentorship Beyond the Codebase:
The program's scope extended past technical instruction. Nfor also mentored interns on professional CV writing and job-market readiness, preparing them not just to ship code, but to present themselves credibly to future employers, a detail that mattered given many were about to enter the tech job market for the first time.
Final Assessment and Recognition:
On the closing day, the cohort's work was evaluated by a panel led by Prof. Ekonde Sone Michael, PhD, then Director of the College of Technology, University of Buea, and now the university's Deputy Vice-Chancellor in charge of Teaching, Professionalization and ICT. The panel was impressed enough by the interns' output that an exceptional cash prize of 80,000 XAF was awarded in recognition of their work.
A First Test in Technical Leadership:
Looking back, Nfor describes this program as his first real test of managing people, timelines, and outcomes, not just writing code, and says it shaped how he has approached every engineering team he has led since. It also marked the very first internship cohort ever hosted at the ODC, University of Buea, a program that has continued to run in subsequent years.