Why we rebuilt the Fellowship as a part-time, four-month programme

The first version of the Engagetal Fellowship was a six-month, full-time intensive. It worked for the people who could take it. That was the problem: a lot of the people we most wanted could not.

For Cohort 03, which starts on 26 October 2026, the Fellowship is four months, part-time and fully remote. It runs as two tracks, Software Engineering + AI/ML and Go-To-Market, and it asks for about 35 hours a week: four to five hours on weekdays, longer on weekends. This post explains the reasoning, because a change like this can look like a compromise. We think it is the opposite.

The real cost of a full-time programme

When we looked at who applied, who was accepted and who actually enrolled, the drop-off had a clear shape. Strong applicants who were already working, or who were supporting a family, got through admissions and then did the arithmetic. Six months without a salary is not a tuition problem you can solve with an Income Share Agreement. It is a rent problem.

A full-time format quietly selects for people who can afford not to earn. That is not the same as selecting for talent, and it is not the group we built the Fellowship for. A part-time format lets people keep their job, keep their income and still do serious work in the evenings and at weekends.

Depth comes from structure, not hours in a chair

The obvious objection is that part-time means shallow. We do not accept that, and the curriculum is the evidence: the engineering track implements Raft in Rust and trains a small transformer from scratch; the GTM track designs and analyses real experiments and builds a lead-scoring model. That is Master's-level material, and we have kept it.

What makes it work in fewer hours is structure. Every week follows the same rhythm: a live seminar most evenings, guided practice alongside it, a Saturday lab in small pods and a Sunday build sprint that ends with a short assessment. Learning spread across a week, with retrieval and practice built in, sticks better than the same hours crammed into long days. Anyone who has studied for an exam knows this. We simply designed around it.

We cut breadth, not depth. Four months is enough if the curriculum is designed backwards from the job.

What we cut, and what we kept

Designing backwards from the job meant being honest about what does not earn its place. We removed survey lectures that touched ten frameworks lightly. We removed long stretches of unstructured project time that mostly produced anxiety. We kept the things that consistently separate strong professionals from average ones: fundamentals, one language learned properly, systems thinking, experimentation, and the ability to explain a decision in writing.

We also kept assessment. The certificate is awarded for meeting a bar, not for attendance: module projects, weekly assessments, module exams and a capstone defended in front of a panel.

Why there is now a Go-To-Market track

Hiring engineers is hard. For most growing companies, hiring people who can take the product to market is harder. Good marketers, business development managers and sales professionals exist, but very few have been trained in the whole system: positioning and pricing, experimentation, enterprise deals, revenue operations and, increasingly, the data and AI skills that sit underneath all of it.

So the second track is for marketers, BD managers and sellers, freshers and experienced alike. It carries the same fee, the same ISA and the same standard as the engineering track.

Freshers and experienced professionals, in the same cohort

A part-time format opened the door to working professionals, and we did not want to close it on graduates who are just starting out. Both are welcome. Everyone covers the same core and meets the same bar to graduate. What changes is where you start: freshers join a Launch pod with structured pre-work and an extra foundations clinic for the first six weeks; experienced people join an Accelerate pod with stretch labs and leadership electives.

We did make one requirement firm. A completed bachelor's degree, in any discipline, is mandatory. The material assumes the habits a degree builds, and many of the employers we work with require one. Final-year students are welcome to apply to a later cohort.

The ISA still means we carry the risk

You can pay the ₹2,00,000 + GST fee upfront, or you can pay nothing upfront under the Income Share Agreement. Under the ISA you pay 10% of your gross monthly income, plus GST, only after we place you in a job that pays above ₹5 LPA. It stops after 24 payment months or at ₹4,00,000, whichever comes first, and it pauses whenever you earn less than the threshold. If we cannot place you, you owe nothing. I have written a plain-language explanation of the ISA separately.

The ISA is the part of the model I care most about, because it keeps us honest. We only get paid when the Fellowship has done its job.

What it asks of you

I want to be direct about the commitment, because part-time does not mean light. Thirty-five hours a week on top of a job is a lot. For four months, your evenings and weekends will belong to the Fellowship. The people who do best plan for it: they talk to their families, block their calendars and treat the Saturday lab like a meeting they cannot move.

If that sounds like the kind of four months you want, applications for Cohort 03 are open. We read every one.