Eighteen years in the education business, and I’ve read a lot of endorsement quotes that say nothing.
“Impressive students.” “A great addition to our team.” “We’re excited about this partnership.” You could swap the college name in any of those sentences and nobody would notice.
Here’s a habit I picked up from the hiring side, back when Rajesh and Venkat previously co-founded FACE Prep and worked with more than 2,000 institutions across the country. When a company gives you a quote about your students, check whether it survives being read out loud to someone who doesn’t work at your company. Most endorsements don’t. They’re written to be printed, not to be true.
Five quotes about Kalvium students, all in the Student Success Report, all with a name and a company attached. I want to walk through what each one actually says, because the specificity is the whole point.
The Microsoft quote is about how they work, not what they know
Start here. Sarv Saravanan, Global VP at Microsoft, praised Kalvium’s students for their development style and working environment, not for knowing a particular programming language.
Read that again slowly. Most colleges get complimented on syllabus coverage. This is a comment about how someone works inside a codebase. Whether they write code that a team can maintain. Whether they think about the environment they’re building in, not just the output.
That’s a harder thing to fake in an interview than syntax knowledge. Any student can memorise enough Python to pass a screening round. Development style shows up over weeks of actual collaboration, and it’s exactly the thing that determines whether a new hire is productive in month one or month six.
The Rupeek quote is about the combination, not either half alone
Amar Prabhu, CTO at Rupeek, said Kalvium students combine knowledge with hands-on experience, and navigate challenges with confidence and adaptability.
I’ve hired a lot of engineers in 18 years. The ones who read like this in an interview are rare, because most programmes optimise for one half of that sentence. One type recites the theory and freezes when requirements change mid-sprint. The other is scrappy and hands-on but can’t explain why a decision was correct beyond “it worked.” Prabhu’s quote is specifically about students who do both.
The Aeroh quote is a founder saying the quiet part out loud
This one surprised me. Shiv Deepak, founder of Aeroh, said he was impressed enough by conversations with Kalvium students that he suggested traditional universities should adopt similar methods.
That’s an unusual thing for a founder to say publicly. Most companies that hire from a programme keep their opinion to “good hire, would hire again.” Deepak went further: he named the method as the reason, and said other institutions should be looking at it. I take that seriously because founders running lean companies don’t usually spend words recommending a competitor’s approach to their own alma mater. They say what they actually think happened in the room.
The Zentience quote has a number in it, which is why it holds up
This is the one I keep coming back to. Aswath Premaradj, founder of Zentience, said the full-stack engineering skills across a Kalvium cohort were strong enough that choosing among them was genuinely difficult. He could only take four.
That’s my favourite of the five, because it names a constraint instead of praising a quality. “Strong students” is an opinion you can’t check. “I could only take four out of a group this strong” is a specific hiring decision with a specific number attached. It tells you something about the distribution across the cohort, not just the top performer. If only one student in the group had been strong, there would have been nothing hard about the choice.
The Google quote closes the loop on talent development
Abhilash Nair, APAC Recruiting Leader at Google, endorsed Kalvium’s placement outcomes and its approach to talent development.
This one reads more general than the other four, and I want to be honest about that rather than stretch it. It’s a recruiting leader at one of the most selective employers in the world putting his name behind both the outcomes and the process that produced them. It doesn’t come with a specific anecdote the way the Zentience or Aeroh quotes do. What it adds is a second lens: not just “this student was good in an interview,” but “this approach to building engineers is one I’d point to.”
Google also sits on Kalvium’s Career Advisory Board through Nair’s involvement, which means the Google relationship runs in both directions. Board input shapes what students build for four years. Then, separately, a recruiter from the same company evaluates what came out the other end. That’s not one data point stretched to look like two. It’s two different functions inside the same company, at two different points in the pipeline, saying similar things.
What five quotes can and can’t tell you
Five names is not a sample size you build a decision on by itself. I want to say that plainly. I’ve watched this go wrong before, on the other side of the table at FACE Prep, where a handful of glowing recruiter quotes got treated as proof of an entire cohort’s readiness. They weren’t. They were data points from specific hiring rounds, at specific companies, with specific people involved.
What these five quotes tell you is something narrower and more useful. When a hiring manager or founder sat across from a Kalvium student, or worked with one on real production code, the description that came back wasn’t generic. It named a working style, a specific number, a decision to only hire four, a suggestion that other universities should look at the method. That specificity is what separates an endorsement from a testimonial template.
The number that actually tells you how the broader cohort did is the placement rate. As of March 2026, 82.40% of Batch 2026 was placed, with the batch still months from graduation, at a median package of Rs 16.5 LPA. These five quotes are consistent with that number. They are not a substitute for it, and they shouldn’t be read as one.
The 24 tech leaders who helped design Kalvium’s curriculum covers a different, earlier layer. It’s about what happens when those same kinds of leaders shape the curriculum years before a hiring round, not just react to its output. What it’s like to interview for a job from Kalvium covers the mechanics from the student’s side: what the mock rounds and DOJO practice actually prepare someone for.
Read together, the two pieces and this one cover the full arc: design, preparation, and the actual room where someone decided to hire. Five quotes that survive being read out loud, out of context, to a stranger. That’s the bar I use, and it’s the only bar worth using.
Rajesh is a co-founder of Kalvium. Rajesh and Venkat previously co-founded FACE Prep, where they worked with 2,000 or more institutions across India. He writes about what the hiring side actually says, and what it doesn’t.