Walton ran internships the way most companies in Bangladesh do — hire, train a little, hope some of it sticks. There was no structured way to spot promising students earlier, before they'd even finished their degree, and no real incentive for universities to send their best people specifically to Walton over anyone else.
Working alongside Ayesha Bintay Awal, I co-designed a fix: a semester-long, MOU-linked apprenticeship called Meteorite — "Glow like a star, make an impact." Instead of competing for graduates after the fact, Walton would identify and fund talent while they were still in school, tied to the university partnerships Walton already had.
Candidates came from universities Walton already had MOUs with — but getting in wasn't automatic. We designed a four-stage filter to find people who could actually think under pressure, not just people with the right CGPA.
Up to BDT 1 lakh, tied to performance and merit — not a blanket stipend.
16–20 hours weekly, built around class schedules, not against them.
A flagship internship track opened up based on apprentice performance.
Lunch and other on-site facilities when working physically.
The pitch wasn't just "let's fund some students" — it came with a full per-university, per-year cost model, sized for a 6-apprentice pilot across six MOU universities (NSU, IUB, BRAC, AIUB, UIU, EWU), so leadership could see exactly what they were approving before scaling it further.
By the time our internship ended in January 2022, Meteorite was fully specified — eligibility, selection funnel, benefit plan, budget model, even a sample survey to validate demand with real students before rollout. It had been discussed heavily internally. It just never got a launch date before the two of us who built it were no longer there to push it across the line.
A finished proposal without an owner still in the room doesn't launch itself — momentum dies with the people who were carrying it.
Looking back, the model itself held up: tie CSR funding to a structured pipeline, filter for initiative over GPA, cost it out before pitching it. The gap wasn't the idea — it was not handing off an internal champion before we left. That's a pattern worth carrying forward into anything I propose now: don't just finish the plan, make sure someone with the authority to ship it is bought in before the clock runs out.