When the Campus Becomes a Career Launchpad: Inside VGU's IAC Internship Fair 2026

By the VGU Leadership Team | May 2026

There is a moment I will never forget from Day 1 of our IAC Internship Fair 2026.

It was early morning — barely 9 AM — and I was walking through the Training & Placement Cell corridor. The campus was already buzzing. Students in formals, portfolios in hand, rehearsing elevator pitches to themselves. A final-year BBA student from Agri-Business Management was helping her junior fix his tie. A CSE student sat cross-legged on the floor, scrolling through a company's LinkedIn page one last time before stepping in. The Robotics Lab had been converted into an interview zone. The Civil Department cabins smelled of fresh coffee and nervous energy.

I stood there and thought — this is exactly why we built VGU the way we did.

Two Days. 60+ Companies. Nearly 2,000 Students. One Mission.

The IAC Internship Fair 2026 was not just an event. It was a statement.

Across two intensive days — May 8 and May 9, 2026 — Vivekananda Global University threw open its gates to over 60 companies from across India. From media powerhouses like Times of India to fintech giants like Axis Bank and Mahindra Finance, from tech-first companies like DigiSamaksh, Fatcamel.ai, OCTOPYDER, and Metablock, to healthcare leaders like CK Birla Hospital and Rungta Hospital, to social-impact organisations like Ambuja Foundation and IN-DEED Foundation — every desk in every corner of our campus was occupied by a recruiter looking for talent.

The numbers tell a story of their own. On Day 1 alone, 1,906+ students appeared for interviews across more than 35 companies. By the time the dust settled at the end of Day 2, the grand total crossed 1,917 interview attendances — nearly 2,000 young professionals sitting across the table from real industry decision-makers, on their own campus, without having to take a bus to Cyber City or wait for a campus drive email that never comes.

By close of Day 1, 380 students had already received final selections, with 268 shortlisted and many more final decisions pending for Day 2.

Every Department. Every Student. No One Left Behind.

What made this fair genuinely different — and I say this with deep pride — was its breadth of inclusion.

This was not a fair only for engineers or only for management students. Look at the data from Day 1's company-wise participation and you will see a cross-section of VGU that warms the heart of any educator

• Times of India interviewed 141 students — from Commerce, CSE, Development Studies, and Management, all in one room

• Ambuja Foundation interviewed 97 students across CSE, Sciences, and Management

• Axis Bank brought in 104 students — MBAs and Agri-Business Management students side by side

• Fatcamel.ai sat with 109 candidates spanning Commerce, CSE, Paramedical, Mechanical Engineering, and Management

• MajesTEA Marketing specifically sought out Agri-Business Management students — 13 of them — alongside 37 from Management Studies

• Riyasat Infra interviewed students from Civil Engineering, Law, Computer Science, and Management — because real-world infrastructure projects need all of them

Day 2 continued this cross-disciplinary spirit, with companies like Blinkit, EPS Group, Gravita India, DB Corp, Paayas Milk, Hike Education, Best Tech Seed, and Leather Village setting up across every floor of the campus — Ground, First, Second, and Basement — ensuring no student had to travel far to find their opportunity.

The 100% Mandatory Internship: Our Promise to Every Student

Let me be honest about something that does not get said enough in Indian higher education circles.

For too long, internships were a privilege — available to students who had the right connections, the right city, or the right social capital. A first-generation college student from a small town in Rajasthan had very little chance of walking into a Mumbai company and saying, "I'd like to intern with you." The system was broken. And most universities chose to look the other way.

We chose differently.

At VGU, every student undergoes at least one mandatory internship before graduation. Not suggested. Not encouraged. Mandatory. Our Training & Placement Cell does not close its doors until every student has a confirmed internship placement. This isn't a marketing line — it is the operating philosophy of our institution.

This aligns perfectly with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which has made internships a mandatory, credit-bearing component of every undergraduate program in India. Under the UGC's Curriculum and Credit Framework, undergraduate students are now required to complete 60–120 hours of internship post their fourth semester. NEP's vision is unambiguous: "Undergraduate education shall provide opportunities for internships with local industry, businesses, artists, craftspersons, and research organisations to develop practical knowledge and skills."

But policy mandates alone don't create careers. Events like the IAC Internship Fair do.

Why the IAC Internship Fair Changes the Ecosystem

The average Indian university still operates on a "placement season" model — a narrow four-month window in the final year where students scramble for jobs. The damage this model does is immense. It creates anxiety, reduces academic performance, and produces graduates who enter the workforce with zero practical exposure and maximum theoretical baggage.

The IAC Internship Fair disrupts all of that — deliberately.

By organising a dedicated internship fair at the pre-final year stage, VGU is doing something structurally transformative. Students don't wait until their final year to meet industry. They build relationships, understand expectations, and develop real skills — two, sometimes three years before graduation. When they finally enter the job market, they enter it not as fresh graduates, but as practiced professionals with internship credentials.

This is not just good for students. It is good for companies. The recruiters who came to our campus — from startups like Aawara AI and Zenz to corporates like Mahindra Finance and DB Corp — told us the same thing every year: students with internship experience onboard faster, ask better questions, and stay longer. The IAC Internship Fair is, in effect, a two-year talent pipeline built right inside a university campus.

Research on NEP 2020 implementation confirms this: institutions that have created structured internship programs with industry partnerships show significantly better outcomes in student employability, interdisciplinary engagement, and industry alignment. The evidence from our own fair is consistent with this — companies like DigiSamaksh (116 students), Averixis Solutions (117 students), and LMD Max (101 students) seeing enormous student interest is proof that when opportunity is brought to the doorstep, talent shows up in force.

The Architecture of Opportunity: How We Make This Work

None of this happens by accident.

Behind every company desk, every faculty coordinator badge, every cabin allocation — there is a system. Our Training & Placement Cell spent weeks mapping companies to departments, matching industry profiles with student skill sets, and ensuring every coordinator from every department was present and accountable.

On Day 2, the campus was organised as a multi-floor opportunity ecosystem:[^3]

• The Ground Floor housed tech and corporate giants — OCTOPYDER, Glow Logics, Hike Education, DB Corp, ACME Group, and more

• The First Floor hosted healthcare, management, and lifestyle recruiters — from Rungta Hospital to Enternal Hospital to Ramha and Rahans Corporation

• The Second Floor was the domain of agriculture, design, and emerging tech — Gravita India, Leather Village, Studio Mousers, and the agri-tech players like Best Tech Seed

• The Basement was electric with startup energy — Blinkit, EPS Group, Mahindra Finance, Ambuja Foundation, Infinity World Welfare Foundation, Pluto Placements, and the digital-first firms like DigiSamaksh and Aawara AI

Our faculty coordinators — Dr. Shivam Tiwari (ACME Group), Ms. Namrata Gurjar (Ambuja Foundation), Mr. Abhirup Sharma (Hike Education), Dr. Sandeep Kumar Jain (Shlaaghy Sahlan), Ms. Shalini Sharma (Humalife Healthcare, virtual), and dozens more — were the invisible architecture that made the day run seamlessly.

The Stories Behind the Numbers

The 380 final selections on Day 1 are not just a statistic. Each one of those is a student who woke up that morning with hope and went to sleep that night with a confirmed opportunity.

Glow Logics selected 33 students out of 73 who appeared — a 45% selection rate that speaks to the quality of our students across Management, Agriculture, and CSE combined.

Fatcamel.ai, one of the most exciting AI-first companies that participated, shortlisted 50 out of 109 students — nearly half — picking talent from Paramedical, Commerce, Engineering, and Management simultaneously. That's a company that looks at humans, not departments. That's the kind of recruiter our students deserve.[^1][2]

Pinbloom Technologies ran a sharp, focused process — 77 students appeared, 15 were selected — with CSE and IT students proving their technical readiness.

IN-DEED Foundation, which works at the intersection of technology and social impact, brought Robotics Lab alive — interviewing 45 students from CSE and Mechanical Engineering, eventually selecting 12. For students interested in purpose-driven careers, this company was a revelation.

And then there were the companies with pending final selections — MajesTEA Marketing, Zenz, Aawara AI, Pluto Placements — whose results were expected on Day 2. The anticipation in the corridors was palpable.

What 1,043 Annual Internship Offers Actually Mean

VGU's Internship Fair runs twice a year — May and November. Together, both editions deliver over 1,043 internship offers annually.

Think about that number in context.

In a country where graduate unemployment remains a persistent challenge, where the gap between what universities teach and what industries need is widening every year, where NEP 2020 has set an ambitious mandate that most institutions are still struggling to operationalize — 1,043 internship offers per year from a single campus is not just impressive. It is a proof of concept for what higher education can look like when it takes employability seriously.

This is what separates VGU from institutions that list "industry exposure" as a bullet point in their brochure. We don't list it. We do it. Twice a year. With data. With accountability. With 60+ companies physically on our campus, eating our cafeteria food, sitting in our faculty rooms, and shaking hands with our students.

The Bigger Picture: Building Rajasthan's Talent Ecosystem

Every company that walks into VGU's Internship Fair is making a bet on Rajasthan's talent.

For years, the narrative was that top companies recruit from IITs, IIMs, and a handful of metro colleges. Students from Jaipur, Kota, Sikar, Barmer, and Bikaner were expected to travel — to Mumbai, to Bangalore, to Pune — to get a seat at the table.

The IAC Internship Fair reverses that narrative.

We bring the table to them.

Companies like Times of India, Axis Bank, Mahindra Finance, CK Birla Hospital, Ambuja Foundation, and DB Corp are not coming to VGU as a favour. They are coming because the talent is here, because the systems are here, and because we have built an institution that makes recruitment efficient, purposeful, and rewarding for every stakeholder.

This is what it means to build a university that is a genuine industry partner — not just an institution that produces certificates, but one that produces careers.

What Comes Next

As Day 2 of the IAC Internship Fair 2026 wraps up today, I am already thinking about November.

We will expand the company roster. We will deepen sector diversity. We will ensure more students from our Agriculture, Allied Health Sciences, Law, Architecture, and Development Studies programs get dedicated industry touchpoints. We will measure, iterate, and improve.

Because that is what VGU does. We don't rest on numbers. We use them as a floor, not a ceiling.

To every student who sat for an interview these two days — your courage showed. To every faculty coordinator who spent weeks preparing for this moment — your dedication showed. To every company that trusted VGU with their recruitment — your faith in our students will not be misplaced.

And to every student still waiting for their final selection result — the journey has just begun. This is your launchpad.

Welcome to the VGU way of doing things.