When people hear that our interns spend time at a palliative care centre, an old age day care, or a school for underprivileged children, they often assume it's a CSR activity — something done for optics, tacked on to the 'real' program. It isn't.
Volunteering in community settings is one of the most formative parts of our training, and interns consistently describe it as the experience that changed them the most. Here's why we do it, what it involves, and what it produces.
Where Our Students Volunteer
We partner with three programmes of the SEEDS in Keelapavoor, Tenkasi — each serving a completely different population, each offering a different kind of human encounter:
SEEDS Palliative Care
SEEDS Palliative Care supports patients living with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions, and their families. Their work spans pain and symptom management, psycho-social counselling, home care guidance, tele-consultations, and bereavement support — a full continuum of care for people going through some of the hardest experiences of their lives.
SEEDS also runs community initiatives that speak to the same warmth. Their 'Paati's Kitchen' — a programme offering traditional homemade food with the story behind each item — reflects what the organisation is about: not just medical care, but preserving dignity, culture, and joy in the lives of those they serve.
Our interns' role here is focused on bridging the digital gap: setting up video calls so patients can see family members who live in other cities or abroad, helping family members learn to use phones and messaging apps, and assisting staff with documentation. The environment requires calm, patience, and the ability to communicate gently under emotionally difficult circumstances. It is unlike anything in a professional IT context — and precisely because of that, it is irreplaceable as a training ground.
Purposeful Aging — Old Age Day Care
The Purposeful Aging programme runs a day care centre (Monday to Saturday, 9 AM to 6 PM) where elderly people spend their day in a structured, supported environment — with nutritious meals, light activities, and genuine companionship. The mission of the programme captures it well: 'aging is not the end of usefulness — it is the unfolding of wisdom, legacy, and grace.'
Many of the participants have family members working abroad or in other cities. Our interns help them with smartphone basics — video calls, messaging, reading news — and support the broader goal of keeping senior citizens mentally active, socially connected, and purposeful. The elderly participants are often the most enthusiastic students our interns have ever taught. They ask questions, try things, and when something works, they are genuinely delighted.
SEEDS Learning Centre
SEEDS Learning Centre serves school-age children between 6 and 16, particularly those facing challenges including financial hardship, family instability, or disrupted schooling. The centre runs every evening from 6 to 8:30 PM, Monday to Saturday, providing free or affordable tutoring, mentoring, life skills, and character development alongside core academics — a second home that focuses on the whole child, not just exam results.
The connection to Consign.Tech runs deeper than just student volunteering. We have run interactive sessions and spoken English training for SEEDS staff and the wider community — because the communication barrier that holds back many students and professionals in our region is something SEEDS understands from their own work with children. The theme from one recent session at SEEDS sums it up well: 'empowering voices; elevating careers.'
Our interns support the centre's digital literacy work: helping children learn to use computers, search the internet safely, type, and engage with educational tools. Teaching children is a completely different challenge from teaching adults. Children lose interest in thirty seconds if something isn't engaging, ask questions you never anticipated, and light up when something finally clicks in a way that adults rarely do. Working with these children forces an intern to explain clearly, energetically, and without jargon — skills that translate directly into professional communication.
Across all three settings, our students provide IT support that these organisations genuinely need — while gaining something that no technical curriculum can teach.
What Happens When You Help Someone Who Doesn't Know Technology
Think about what it takes to help an 80-year-old man video call his daughter in Singapore for the first time. You cannot use technical language. You cannot assume they've done anything like this before. You cannot be impatient when they press the wrong button — again. You have to find language that works for where they are, not where you are.
This is harder than any technical interview. And it teaches more about communication than any amount of classroom training. The interns who go through these sessions come back different — more patient, more clear, more aware of how much they're assuming when they explain things.
The Professional Impact
Employers increasingly look for evidence that candidates are more than their technical skills. Volunteering — especially with populations that require patience and empathy — is a signal that someone has depth. It comes up in interviews. It distinguishes candidates who otherwise look identical on paper.
Beyond interviews: in any IT role, you will eventually need to explain something technical to someone non-technical — a manager, a client, a user who is frustrated. The interns who have sat with elderly patients at a day care and found ways to explain what a video call is are dramatically better at this than those who haven't.
The Human Impact — What It Gives the Volunteers
Several of our interns have described the volunteering experiences as grounding — a word they use unprompted. When you're working in IT, it's easy to lose sight of what the work is for. Technology exists to serve human beings. When you sit with a patient receiving palliative care and watch their face change when they see their grandchild on a screen — that's what it's for.
“There was a woman at the day care who hadn't seen her son in three years — he's working in Dubai. I helped her call him on WhatsApp video. She cried. He cried. I didn't expect to feel the way I did about that. It changed something in how I think about this work.”
— Former intern, Consign.Tech Academy
Students who go through these experiences are less likely to treat their work as merely transactional. They understand — in a way that can't be taught in a classroom — that what they build and maintain and fix connects to real people's lives.
This Is Not Mandatory — But Almost Everyone Chooses It
We make the volunteering component available and strongly encouraged, but not compulsory. We describe what it involves and why we believe in it, and we let interns decide. The large majority choose to participate — and none of them have regretted it.
What Each Setting Teaches That the Others Can't
Each of the three settings teaches something distinct. Palliative care teaches emotional steadiness — the ability to be present and useful in a difficult environment without making it about yourself. The old age day care teaches patience and the art of slowing down to meet someone where they are, rather than where you wish they were. SEEDS teaches clarity and creativity — how to explain something simply enough that a 10-year-old understands it, which is harder than explaining it to an engineer.
Interns who go through all three come out with a range of communication skills that no classroom exercise can replicate. They've been tested in environments that don't care about their technical credentials — environments where only their ability to connect with another person mattered.
If this is the kind of program you want to be part of — technical, professional, and genuinely human — we'd love to hear from you.
