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ISDIC

Community curriculum

Four domains. One year.

A structured, semester-by-semester playbook for every ISDIC community, so students know what is coming and chapter leaders know what to run.

This is the planned activity framework for a full academic year. It describes what each chapter is set up to run, not a record of events already delivered.

Community 01

CybersecurityCommunity

Build India's next generation of security professionals through hands-on attack and defense practice — not textbook theory. Every session ends with a student having done something real: solved a flag, exploited a vulnerability, or secured a system.

activities / year
12
major events
4
skill levels
3
cadence
Monthly

The year, quarter by quarter

12 planned entries across the academic year.

  1. Jan — Mar

    1. Community kickoff

      Onboarding

    2. Linux & networking

      Workshop

    3. Beginner CTF

      Competition

  2. Apr — Jun

    1. OWASP Top 10 series

      Workshop series

    2. Bug bounty intro

      Session

    3. Inter-college CTF

      Open competition

  3. Jul — Sep

    1. Red vs. blue team lab

      Simulation

    2. CEH bootcamp

      Certification prep

    3. Campus security drive

      Outreach

  4. Oct — Dec

    1. Advanced CTF

      All-level competition

    2. Annual security summit

      Flagship event

    3. Certificates & showcase

      Year-end

Flagship event

Flagship — quarterly

Capture The Flag (CTF) Competition

Timed team challenge where students exploit intentionally vulnerable systems to capture hidden flags. Three parallel tracks — Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced — so no one is excluded. Winner gets certificates, sponsor prizes, and a recommendation letter.

  • Web exploitation
  • Reverse engineering
  • Cryptography
  • Forensics
  • OSINT
  • Binary exploitation
  • Steganography

Activities

Monthly workshops

  • Ethical hacking workshop series

    Monthly

    3-hour sessions on one specific attack vector per month. Students open a terminal and exploit alongside the instructor using HackTheBox or TryHackMe. No slides-only sessions — ever.

    • Network scanning
    • SQL injection
    • XSS
    • Privilege escalation

  • Industry leader guest sessions

    Monthly

    45-min talk + 15-min Q&A from a working security professional. Topics: real incident postmortems, career paths, current threat landscape. Recorded for members who miss it.

    • CISO talks
    • Incident stories
    • Career paths
    • Bug bounty journeys

Quarterly intensives

  • Threat simulation lab

    Quarterly

    Red team vs. blue team in a sandboxed college network. One group attacks, the other defends. Teaches both mindsets. Run using free tools — no special hardware needed.

    • Red team
    • Blue team
    • Incident response
    • Log analysis

  • Certification prep bootcamp

    Twice/year

    Intensive 2-day prep camps for CEH, CompTIA Security+, and eJPT.

    • CEH
    • CompTIA Security+
    • eJPT
    • Study groups

  • Bug bounty introduction program

    Twice/year

    Walk through HackerOne and Bugcrowd platforms, hall-of-fame programs, and responsible disclosure. Invite a student who has earned a real bounty to share their story.

    • HackerOne
    • Bugcrowd
    • Responsible disclosure

  • Security awareness campus drive

    Twice/year

    Community members run a campus-wide campaign — phishing simulations, password hygiene, social engineering demos. Builds leadership skills and positions ISDC as campus guardians.

    • Phishing demo
    • Password hygiene
    • Social engineering

Skill progression

  1. Level 01

    Foundation

    Months 1 – 3

    • Linux command line basics
    • Networking fundamentals
    • Intro to Kali Linux
    • First TryHackMe room

  2. Level 02

    Intermediate

    Months 4 – 8

    • OWASP Top 10 in practice
    • Burp Suite proficiency
    • Nmap and recon tools
    • HackTheBox easy machines

  3. Level 03

    Advanced

    Months 9 – 12

    • Active Directory attacks
    • Malware analysis basics
    • Bug bounty hunting
    • CTF leadership & design

Tools used

  • TryHackMe
  • HackTheBox
  • PicoCTF
  • Kali Linux
  • Burp Suite
  • Wireshark
  • Nmap
  • Metasploit
  • OWASP WebGoat
  • VulnHub

Target outcomes

  • At least 1 certification

    Every active member targets eJPT or CompTIA Security+ before the academic year ends

  • Public CTF ranking

    A verified HackTheBox or TryHackMe profile showing real, measurable progress

  • Interview-ready portfolio

    GitHub with 2+ security writeups, vulnerability research, or lab documentation

Community 02

AI & MLCommunity

Move students from "I've used ChatGPT" to "I built and deployed a model." Every session involves running actual code in Google Colab — no theory-only lectures. The goal is a portfolio of real ML projects recruiters can see and test.

activities / year
14
bootcamps
2
projects built
4+
code sessions
Biweekly

The year, quarter by quarter

11 planned entries across the academic year.

  1. Jan — Mar

    1. Python & data bootcamp

      2-day intensive

    2. EDA with Indian datasets

      Workshop

    3. First Kaggle team entry

      Competition

  2. Apr — Jun

    1. Supervised learning workshop

      Workshop

    2. Build-a-model Fridays ×3

      Recurring session

    3. LLM awareness session

      Workshop

  3. Jul — Sep

    1. Deep learning bootcamp

      2-day intensive

    2. RAG & LangChain workshop

      Workshop

    3. Paper reading club ×2

      Research session

  4. Oct — Dec

    1. AI for social good sprint

      6-week project

    2. Demo day & awards

      Showcase

Flagship event

Flagship — Twice/year

Weekend ML Bootcamp

From zero to deployed model in 2 days. Day 1: Python, NumPy, Pandas, data cleaning. Day 2: Scikit-learn, model training, evaluation, and Streamlit deployment on Hugging Face Spaces. Students leave with a live app and a shareable link.

  • Sentiment analyzer
  • Price predictor
  • Image classifier
  • Recommendation engine
  • Custom chatbot

Activities

Monthly sessions

  • Build-a-model Fridays

    Biweekly

    A community lead builds a model live from scratch every other Friday. Audience codes along in Colab. Topics rotate across classification, NLP, computer vision, and time series.

    • Google Colab
    • Live coding
    • Project-based

  • LLM & generative AI series

    Monthly

    Monthly deep-dives into LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, and fine-tuning. Build a chatbot on a custom dataset, compare API providers, or fine-tune a model on free Colab GPU.

    • Prompt engineering
    • RAG
    • LangChain
    • Fine-tuning

  • Research paper reading club

    Monthly

    One member presents a landmark ML paper in plain English. Papers: Attention Is All You Need, ResNet, CLIP, Stable Diffusion, AlphaFold. Builds technical vocabulary that separates good engineers from great ones.

    • Transformers
    • CNNs
    • Diffusion models

  • Data analytics workshop

    Quarterly

    Real Indian datasets — Census, Zomato, IPL, Nifty stocks. Students explore, visualize, and present findings. Teaches EDA, data storytelling, and dashboarding.

    • Pandas
    • Matplotlib
    • Tableau Public
    • Power BI

Competitions and projects

  • Kaggle competition sprint

    Quarterly

    Community teams participate in a live Kaggle competition together. Senior members mentor beginners. The target is a leaderboard ranking — showing companies a Kaggle profile is proof of real ability.

    • Kaggle
    • Feature engineering
    • Ensemble methods

  • AI for social good challenge

    Annual

    Teams build ML solutions for real Indian problems — crop yield, disease detection, traffic management. 6-week mentor-guided sprint. Winning project gets presented to a company partner and may receive seed funding.

    • Social impact
    • Team project
    • Demo day

Skill progression

  1. Level 01

    Foundation

    Months 1 – 3

    • Python for data science
    • NumPy and Pandas
    • Data visualization basics
    • First Kaggle submission

  2. Level 02

    ML practitioner

    Months 4 – 8

    • Supervised and unsupervised ML
    • Model evaluation and tuning
    • Neural networks intro
    • Deployed Streamlit app

  3. Level 03

    Advanced

    Months 9 – 12

    • Deep learning with PyTorch
    • LLM fine-tuning and RAG
    • MLOps fundamentals
    • Kaggle top 30% ranking

Tools used

  • Google Colab
  • Kaggle Notebooks
  • Hugging Face
  • Scikit-learn
  • PyTorch
  • LangChain
  • Streamlit
  • Gradio
  • Weights & Biases
  • FastAI

Target outcomes

  • Live deployed model

    A Streamlit or Gradio app hosted on Hugging Face Spaces with a public URL

  • Kaggle public profile

    Verified competition participation with notebooks showing real ML methodology

  • Project portfolio

    GitHub with 2+ end-to-end ML projects covering different domains and techniques

Community 03

Cloud & DevOpsCommunity

Cloud and DevOps skills have the highest employer demand and lowest campus coverage in India. Every member leaves able to deploy a production-grade application on real cloud infrastructure — independently, not just by following a tutorial.

activities / year
12
certs targeted
3
live infra projects
2
hands-on labs
Monthly

The year, quarter by quarter

11 planned entries across the academic year.

  1. Jan — Mar

    1. Linux for cloud admins

      Workshop

    2. First AWS deploy

      Hands-on lab

    3. AWS CCP prep start

      Cert prep

  2. Apr — Jun

    1. Docker containerization

      Workshop

    2. CI/CD with GitHub Actions

      Build challenge

    3. AWS certification exam

      Target milestone

  3. Jul — Sep

    1. Kubernetes 2-day workshop

      Intensive

    2. Terraform IaC lab

      Lab session

    3. SRE & monitoring setup

      Workshop

  4. Oct — Dec

    1. Cloud infrastructure hackathon

      24-hour event

    2. Architecture showcase day

      Flagship

Flagship event

Flagship — Annual

Multi-team Cloud Infrastructure Hackathon

24-hour event where teams build and deploy a complete cloud-native application — frontend, backend, database, CI/CD pipeline, and monitoring — all on real cloud. Judged on uptime, architecture decisions, and cost optimization. Cloud sponsors provide free credits.

  • Architecture quality
  • Uptime and reliability
  • CI/CD implementation
  • Cost optimization
  • Security posture

Activities

Monthly workshops

  • Cloud fundamentals workshop

    Monthly

    Hands-on labs using AWS Free Tier. Students deploy, not watch. Each month covers one service: EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, IAM. Every session ends with a running app on real infrastructure.

    • AWS Free Tier
    • GCP
    • Azure for Students
    • EC2

  • DevOps engineer guest sessions

    Monthly

    Working DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers share what their day looks like, incidents they've handled, and tools they actually use. Guests bring real architecture diagrams (anonymized).

    • Production incidents
    • Architecture deep-dives
    • Career paths

Quarterly intensives

  • CI/CD pipeline build challenge

    Quarterly

    Teams build a complete CI/CD pipeline — commit triggers tests, build, Docker image, and cloud deploy. Uses GitHub Actions (free). The single most in-demand DevOps skill in hiring.

    • GitHub Actions
    • Docker
    • Automated testing

  • Docker and Kubernetes deep dive

    Quarterly

    Day 1: containerize and push to Docker Hub. Day 2: deploy on Kubernetes with Minikube. Students leave with a container-native project. K8s is the #1 cloud skill gap in Indian fresher hiring.

    • Docker
    • Kubernetes
    • Minikube

  • Infrastructure as Code lab

    Twice/year

    Students provision full cloud environments with Terraform — VPC, subnets, EC2, security groups — then tear it down with one command. The leap from "I use cloud" to "I build cloud infrastructure."

    • Terraform
    • Ansible
    • CloudFormation

  • SRE and monitoring workshop

    Twice/year

    Set up Prometheus and Grafana to monitor a live app. Define SLOs, create dashboards, configure alerts. Teaches what "keeping production running" actually means in practice.

    • Prometheus
    • Grafana
    • SLOs
    • Alerting

Skill progression

  1. Level 01

    Cloud basics

    Months 1 – 3

    • Linux for cloud admins
    • First AWS Free Tier deploy
    • S3 static site hosting
    • EC2 management basics

  2. Level 02

    DevOps practitioner

    Months 4 – 8

    • Docker containers
    • GitHub Actions CI/CD
    • AWS Solutions Architect prep
    • Terraform basics

  3. Level 03

    Cloud engineer

    Months 9 – 12

    • Kubernetes in production
    • Multi-cloud architecture
    • SRE practices
    • Cost optimization strategies

Tools used

  • AWS Free Tier
  • GCP Free Credits
  • Azure for Students
  • GitHub Actions
  • Docker Desktop
  • Minikube
  • Terraform
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana OSS
  • Play with K8s

Target outcomes

  • Cloud certification

    At least one AWS, GCP, or Azure certification before the year ends

  • Live cloud project

    A full-stack app deployed on cloud with CI/CD, monitoring, and a public URL

  • Infrastructure portfolio

    GitHub with Terraform configs, Dockerfiles, and architecture diagrams from real labs

Community 04

DeveloperCommunity

The broadest audience and most visible activity hub. The mission: turn students who "know programming" into engineers who ship real products, contribute to open source, and think in systems — not just syntax.

activities / year
16
hackathons
2
OSS PRs / member
4+
coding touchpoint
Weekly

The year, quarter by quarter

11 planned entries across the academic year.

  1. Jan — Mar

    1. Git and OSS onboarding

      Mandatory session

    2. Weekly coding sessions

      Recurring

    3. First OSS PR drive

      Contribution sprint

  2. Apr — Jun

    1. Full-stack bootcamp

      4-week program

    2. System design sessions ×2

      Workshop

    3. Hackathon 1 (48 hrs)

      Competition

  3. Jul — Sep

    1. Open source sprint 2

      Contribution sprint

    2. Build in public showcase

      Community talk

    3. System design deep dives ×2

      Workshop

  4. Oct — Dec

    1. Hackathon 2 (flagship)

      Major competition

    2. Year-end project demo

      Showcase

Flagship event

Flagship — Twice/year

48-Hour Hackathon

Teams of 4 build a working product in 48 hours around a real problem statement. Judged by industry mentors on product thinking, code quality, and execution — not just the idea. Top 3 teams receive sponsor prizes and fast-track to internship interviews with partner companies.

  • Product thinking
  • Code quality
  • UI and UX
  • Technical execution
  • Pitch clarity

Activities

Weekly and recurring

  • Weekly coding sessions

    Weekly

    2-hour sessions alternating between DSA problem solving, project building, and code review. Senior members mentor juniors. Weekly consistency is the biggest predictor of placement success.

    • LeetCode
    • Code review
    • Peer programming
    • DSA

  • System design workshop series

    Monthly

    One system design problem each month, discussed and whiteboarded as a group. Design Twitter's feed, Zomato's delivery tracking, UPI payment flow. The most-feared interview round — practice is the only cure.

    • High-level design
    • Database choices
    • Scalability
    • Caching

  • SDE guest sessions and mock interviews

    Monthly

    First 30 min: engineer's story and advice. Last 30 min: 2 volunteers solve a problem on screen while the engineer gives real-time live feedback. The most anxiety-reducing activity you can offer.

    • Mock interviews
    • Live coding
    • Real feedback

  • Build in public — tech talk series

    Monthly

    Members present a project they built — what worked, what failed, what they learned. Builds confidence and normalizes failure. Record and post on YouTube — becomes your content marketing machine over time.

    • Project showcases
    • YouTube content
    • Technical speaking

Quarterly programs

  • Open source contribution drive

    Quarterly

    Community-wide push to contribute to real open source projects. Identify beginner-friendly issues on popular Indian OSS and global repos. A merged PR in a real project beats 10 personal projects on any resume.

    • GitHub
    • Good first issues
    • Indian OSS
    • PR reviews

  • Full-stack project bootcamp

    Twice/year

    4-week guided program building a complete app — React frontend, Node/Django backend, PostgreSQL database, deployed on Render. Members work in pairs. Output: a live URL to share with recruiters.

    • React
    • Node.js
    • PostgreSQL
    • Render deploy

Skill progression

  1. Level 01

    Coder

    Months 1 – 3

    • Git and GitHub fluency
    • DSA basics (arrays, trees)
    • First open source PR
    • Personal project deployed

  2. Level 02

    Builder

    Months 4 – 8

    • Full-stack app with database
    • 50+ LeetCode problems
    • Hackathon participation
    • System design basics

  3. Level 03

    Engineer

    Months 9 – 12

    • Production app with live users
    • 3+ merged OSS pull requests
    • System design interview-ready
    • Mentoring juniors in community

Tools used

  • GitHub
  • LeetCode
  • Render
  • Railway
  • Vercel
  • VS Code
  • Replit
  • Postman
  • Figma
  • Notion

Target outcomes

  • Live product

    A full-stack application with real users, a public URL, and clean code on GitHub

  • Open source contributor

    At least 3 merged pull requests in real external repositories — not toy projects

  • Interview-ready

    100+ LeetCode problems, 2 system design patterns practiced, mock interview done

The annual calendar

All communities across a full year.

Quarter 1

Jan — Mar

  • CyberBeginner CTF
  • AI & MLML bootcamp (2 days)
  • CloudFirst AWS deploy lab
  • DevGit + OSS onboarding
  • AllQ1 Cross-domain demo day

Quarter 2

Apr — Jun

  • CyberInter-college CTF (open)
  • AI & MLKaggle competition sprint
  • CloudCI/CD build challenge
  • DevHackathon 1 — 48 hrs
  • AllQ2 Cross-domain demo day

Quarter 3

Jul — Sep

  • CyberRed vs. blue simulation
  • AI & MLDeep learning bootcamp
  • CloudKubernetes 2-day workshop
  • DevOpen source sprint 2
  • AllQ3 Cross-domain demo day

Quarter 4

Oct — Dec

  • CyberAnnual security summit
  • AI & MLAI for social good demo
  • CloudCloud infra hackathon (24h)
  • DevHackathon 2 — flagship
  • All — Year-endAnnual showcase + certificates