The Perfect Summer Internship

Hello and welcome to Abhijith's Internship Experience. Get ready to be swept for a crazy ride filled with gigantic excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and an ungodly amount of leg/butt cramps from sitting and staring at a laptop all day......well if you haven’t immediately closed your web browser after reading that exciting introduction, I can tell that you really want to learn about the MBA internship experience (or facebook is not open in your office and you need to kill time somewhere else).

I am into the last fortnight of my summer internship here at Tata Steel, and I have begun to consider the things that I wanted to have accomplished before I leave here on June 12th.

Notwithstanding the current (read BAD, but improving) market conditions in which we have found ourselves, it can still be difficult to find perspective on the "goal" of an MBA internship. Therefore, in the spirit of blogging and to make my friends feel better about my chances after I finish here and try to find a job, I have decided to filter my experiences here in the context of "a dream summer internship".

Without further ado, here are my top 10 ingredients of a perfect summer internship.

1. Work somewhere you can make a difference. It should come as no surprise that if you can't contribute materially, it's very unlikely that you or your employer will enjoy your attempts to "drive value and create synergies throughout the value chain" (insert some other MBAisque quote here). I took an offer I knew I could contribute to, and have been busy contributing since day 1. Trust me I am :)

2. Work somewhere that is challenging. No problem here either. I am working in a role that I do have some relation to(industrial products), but in a completely new industry. Without this ingredient one could get bored... not an option for an over-achieving B-school student.

3. Work for a firm that will add value to your resume. Again, check. Tata Steel certainly undergoing a test of its business model and maybe posting losses, but Tata is still Tata and their name is definitely a strength to my resume.

4. Clarify your role and responsibilities before accepting. This is something I could have done better one, because clearing up any miscommunications makes it a lot easier to "hit the ground running".

5. Don't be a jerk. Many of your peers will work for lesser-known firms, while still others will work for bigger and more prestigious firms. Who CARES! Never forget that many of the worlds richest individuals left B-School without an offer and then started their own firms. You never know who will be successful and who won't, so be cool to everyone.

6. Have fun. Do it while being true to the company that took the risk to hire you as an intern. Having fun means a lot and certainly the two months of internship are a relief from the stress and workload of a B-School. Go on trips, have weekend parties, meet old friends.

7. Network more with the people whom you work with. This could be with your guide, with other people working in the firm and certainly be good friends with the interns from other colleges. You can never tell when you'll need to make a call to one of those guys.

8. Look forward to getting more work. This is important because if you don't look forward to doing work, it does show on your attitude in the office and the guide and others might notice this as a sign of weakness in you.

9. Be smart in your analysis. Try to impress the audience, not by using snazzy animations in your presentations, but by having done good work in the field and then analyzing the data you've got. The analysis is as important as the data collection; as one project guide said the hard work is in getting the data, but the smart work is in doing the analysis. So be a smart intern in addition to being a hard-working intern.

10. Get a job offer. No matter how awesome you feel now, the job market is a strange beast and can change at any moment. Do everything you can to head back to school with a future job locked down. This is an essential ingredient of the "perfect" MBA internship.

If you collect all 10 of these ingredients, you will head back to school with the quiet satisfaction that comes from a job well done and enjoy a 2nd year much better than your first...

At least that's what I'm telling myself right now :-)

I moved

Sometimes I wonder if I've changed so much, that myself five years ago wouldn't like what he sees in me now. I've changed from what I had told the guy who asked me 1st time in an interview. It has been a few days since this blog has been lying without a post. To be precise 103 days since I've last posted in this Blog. A lot has happened over the days and a lot of that could be found in my Facebook Album that tells about the 3rd Trimester I've had at IIFT. Life has been hectic, but then most of the time the Delhi cold made me wrap myself under the blanket and snore.

I missed a lot of classes and am sure my grades will drop severely this term, but then most of the times I've had a very bad mood and almost everyday I just wanted the course to end. Maybe it was seeing the seniors roam around the campus practically doing nothing other than waste time, maybe it was the stupid projects that were handed out like candies or maybe it was the faculty which didn't inspire me to take up studies seriously.

Anyways coming to the topic at hand - I've always wanted to have a domain name of my own and I had once mentioned this to Hari. He had said at that time that he was planning to gift me a domain name for my 24th birthday which is coming up real soon coz he's got a lot of cash reserves in his paypal account, thanks to the Advertisements he's earned. So yesterday while at his home he said why don't we setup the blog today? We just did that and here I am with my own domain name in the WWW. Ladies and gentlemen presenting before you :-

WWW.ABHIJITH.IN

Way to go Tiger

The title doesn't mean that I am going to speak about Tiger Woods and his last few adventures wherein he has lived upto the tag-line that he used to endorse until a couple of days back, but he did live upto my dream(I am sure he is living upto the dreams of a lot of yougsters, especially after this).

But no, this one is rather about my own adventure today that made me quite a star. Today was the last day of my 2nd trimester examinations. I had Macroeconomics in the morning and it is considered to be a toughie amongst all of our exams. I was having a lot of sleepless nights in the last few days due to the exams and sleep was really catching upto me. I and two my roommates had devised a ingenious plan(something like the C2D from 5.someone) where I would get my 7 hours of daily sleep and still manage to study. We would sleep in the evening from 5-10 PM(not together, don't get ideas people), then have dinner, study the entire night till 4 or 5 AM(different subjects demand different hours :D). We came up with this plan after the 1st of our exams, corporate finance, went down the drain. This was going quite fine but still sleep was catching up to me each day and I hadn't slept at all in the last 2 days, due to the extremely demanding subjects. Yesterday I fell asleep in the exam hall, but that isn't something very new to me; as I am a regular sleeper in classes over here at IIFT.

What happened today is something that only I've heard from friends in some of the other IIX's(x = T or M depending on how F***Ked up your life is). Today after the 1st exam which was a breezer, I had a solid three hours to sleep before the next exam which happened to be Business Communication - 2. It was basically a paper full of s**t where we are supposed to do a lot of Bulls**t analysis about written and other communication methods.

I slept at 1130 in the morning and didn't even get up for lunch. I was woken up at 1 by a roommate for lunch, but then sleep was more alluring to me at that point of time and I didn't bother to get up. I remember having nice dreams about how a hot chick (correction, make that two hot chicks) will be sitting next to me and how in the 3D movie world I will join them..........ok this is getting too much. Coming back, as I said I was having these awesome dreams and I didn't remember to set an alarm in my cell phone to get up on time @ 3 PM to write the exam and just as when I was having a GREAT time with the above mentioned chicks in my hWAT dream, i get these irritating phone calls from my Class Representative. He had called me 4 times before I picked the phone and then I saw the time on the phone and was stunned. It was 15:09. I was 09 minutes late already for a stupid exam in which I didn't want to get an F. I jumped out of bed and was shocked but happy to see one of my roommates also sleeping in his bed. I kicked him and we both found our pens and ran to the exam hall. I was 15 minutes late as I reached the exam hall and all my classmates were having a good laugh at my misfortune.

That is MBA for you my friends, a course where your roommates forgets to wake you up from sleep; but still you end up being a joker and not a loser :)

PS:For the concerned folks - I did take the exam and went on to bulls**t how I will be nice to a subordinate who f**ks up a PPT or when I am about to fire him off :)

My Generation

Don’t make someone a priority, if you are just an option......

I absolutely love this saying that I cannot find an author to give credit. It rings true everyday of my life. I have used this saying more than a couple of times in my GTalk status messages and also in my facebook, twitter and orkut pages. But till today I hadn't given serious thought to this line. You might ask what happened so much today to make me think about this sad fact of life. I believe it hasn't been a smooth sailing for anyone in their love-life, who ever says that they've the perfect love story, are either lying or are acting in a movie.

Now coming to the saying- Whether they are friends, family or a special someone they really can’t be that special if you are just an option in their life. I feel that people do make you an option in life, especially in your work, your college(at times it does feel wrong), your social circle and so on. It has been the norm in the fast moving world that we live in. I still remember the term Friendship of Convenience when it was told to me by a teacher at the TIME centre I had attended. He told about people being friends for just the sake of using eachother when they need something. People who think like:

How can I use him? He is well connected, financially well off, resourceful, he is a doctor, lawyer. Build and maintain the relationship, some day he could be useful. Usefulness goes, friendship goes.

I hadn't got seen much of FOC(not pronounced as the F word, but just F.O.C) in my life until I joined my work and their again in my training programme the company HR head told about the same term. He rather gave a 30 slide PPT on how to do the same quoted lines I've given above. But finally he told the term Social Networking, rather than FOC.

I had heard about networking since I am a part of the Orkut era, the Facebook generation, the guys who wake up and tweet their status and check their mails before going for a piss and will even F**K for the next best thing. Now when my generation decides to make friends it is a simple step. There are a thousand different places where you can meet people, maybe real, maybe virtual. But anyways you will always find people; more so because you live in a world with 6.6 Billion people. But still people will be happy to talk to some unknown on a website rather than with their next door neighbour or even to the people living in their homes.

There is a saying "my enemy's enemy is my friend." Common enemy goes, friendship also goes. True Friendship cannot survive without the element of mutual respect and that I feel is the one thing that lacks in these ONLINE, always there for you friends :).

I am not pointing fingers at anyone, I am very much part of this generation, I get happy when people say they "LIKE" my stupid messages in Facebook, or when someone RT's my tweets; why go that far, I ADORE the one's who comment on my blog and for me and my generation this has become a way of attaining social recognition, of having a status that they won't get otherwise. Especially fat guys like me who would not be able to make it to any happening parties or be invited to movies or hang outs because of their looks or because they can't dance that well and so on and on........

Now I feel I've digressed quite a huge bit away from the saying at the start the blog; so let me just FOCUS and get back to the point. (MBA has been doing its good bits to me too, don't you see the jargon's I've used till now :D). So I was talking about someone making you an option when you make them or rather plan to make them a priority. I feel that in the family life the FOC should just F*** off and you should have sincerity in your relationships. I can't imagine a father having a caring relation with his children only so that he thinks they treat him well when he's old. Going by the present way MY generation is going ahead I don't think even if we care for our kids they will take care of us when we're dying. Maybe this fear is making my generation to run more after the all elusive MONEY.

I still remember my dad's words when I had told him that I want to quit my job and go for an MBA, he was shouting into the phone that I am mad to leave such a well paying job and I don't realise the value of a government job. It is true, my generation doesn't know the value of a government job. Even after working in a government company I feel that I would do good in a private firm because their I will get recognised for my work. Its true that private firms reward people who show dedication and usually in govt. firms and departments good dedication means trouble for the person.

But then when I joined my course in July and in the discussions in class when people diss about government jobs and the work culture and how corrupt the officers are and that if the country is allowed to run by private firms then we'd beat US in a matter of years and all that wonderful ideas go around. Only the handful of people who've worked in govt. firms and have led a non-corrupt, non-maligned career(albeit short) will disagree and try to persuade that NOT ALL the officers are like that(heck I too was in that category a few months back, so how can I agree??).

My generation takes pride in the discussions and dialogues that we all carry out, but still we either never vote, or never care to know who wins the elections. As far as we are concerned it is always one corrupt guy to another, one uneducated fool to another and one idiot to another. But like the Tata Tea campaign I ask isn't it time to wake up and do something about it?

But then I myself am not doing anything about it other than proudly showing my finger off about the vote I cast, then why will anyone else do anything about it??

PS: Title credited to The Who for their wonderful song - My Generation.

*Disclaimer: I am being overly emotional tonight. These are the rantings of a person with absolutely nothing fun to do right now. And instead of getting studies done, is making non-sense blogs.

Its Party Time!!!!!!

Today was the 1st party I had since I've joined IIFT. It was a greatly planned party and was executed well by the senior batch cultural committee. We'd been eagerly waiting for the freshers party, which unfortunately never happened due to many issues(which I'd rather not get into now).

The party was Titled "Coalesce '09 : The Rock N Roll". The party had some cultural programmes and in addition we had the usual three things which are present in all IIFT parties : DJ, Dance and Daaru :). The cultural events had the usual of : Group Dance, Group/Solo Song and since we are a B-School we had an Ad-Spoof competition as well.

As part of the events I was part of a Group Dance team; no don't worry I didn't dance and break the stage, but I was the Music composer(rather arranger); I was the guy who mixed the songs for the dance which some 20 odd guys performed. It was a take on the event which we all might have done in our primary school days(atleast I remember seeing this in my young days @ school) called Action Song. In school days the song was sung by the same person who performed the actions. Here we had the song which was a mix of some old hindi songs and some new ones as well and the 20+ guys on stage enacted the same song in ACTION on the stage with good synchronisation.

We worked on the dance starting at 5 PM for the event was scheduled to begin at 7 PM. We had simple steps and by 6 45 PM we had a pretty good set-up ready for the event. I've not yet got any videos of the same, but I'll upload it asap.

The song has been uploaded for your listening pleasure if you desire to hear it :

Get this widget | Track details | eSnips Social DNA

The other events were fun and we were the 1st group to do the dance on stage. It was fun and the dance had great appreciation from all the students present in the auditorium. We guys performed the dance two times, thanks to a technical glitch and also audience request.

Then we had some great songs sung by the singers and accompanied by the musicians of our batch. After this came a slew of spoof ad's which basically spoofed the following products:

• Fair and Lovely
• Colgate Toothpaste
  
• Huggies Diapers
• Kamasutra condoms campaign
• Liril

The hit of the day was the KS Condom campaign followed by the Huggies Diapers Ad. Both these Ad's were spoofed by many teams we saw lot of budding Padamsee's and Piyush Pandey's at work.

We had some entertaining Bhangra performances by the guys from Punjab and some other dances as well which were good fun to watch. We had Saurav of our batch who turned out to be the star of the day with his dance performances being in great demand. His new styles and matka's caught the audience unaware and it was truly a great feeling to watch Saurav do dance with the same ease he solves Accountancy problems.

Towards the end of the events we had the prizes being distributed and surprisingly our dance got the 1st prize and it was an awesome feeling to be on stage to receive the prize with some 20 other guys who I swear would never have danced in their entire lives; atleast half of them would never have had the chance to be on stage for a DANCE, if anything else :). But we did it, we the underdogs got the prize.

After the prizes the party floor was thrown open and the DJ was playing some good music, but since it was 9 30 PM all rushed to get their growling tummies filled with the awesome food being served. In addition the BAR was opened by 10 PM and soon the party's mood picked up with guys and gals hitting the floor and showing their moves on the dance floor. The DJ started with latest Hindi film songs and then some Punjabi songs.

After some time I too joined the crowd and started to make my earth-moving MOVES. Yes, even I danced, so you know how HIGH the mood of the party was :). The songs were all welcomed by the crowd with them singing along and since this was the 1st time we all had a party together and most importantly this was almost the end of 1st Trimester @ IIFT we all were desperately in need of a Break and what a break we had.

This is one snap which I got from the many which were taken today. More to be added as I get them.


The dancing continued non-stop till 1 AM when finally the DJ called quits and the party was wrapped up. The last songs had all of us forming a mosh-pit and crying Encore. Even after that we had a budding shayar in the senior batch giving out some of his fine-tuned Sher's. It was a great evening indeed and now @ 5 AM I still am getting goosebumps thinking about the night's events.

I think each and every person enjoyed to the hilt and those who missed the party had missed a big part of the MBA Life, the IIFT Life. For them I've just this comic from XKCD.

You can only dream of the fun we had today

Sleepless nights; sleeping in classes. That's MBA :)

Its been about twenty days since I’ve joined IIFT. As I sit in the cool confines of the A/C classroom now i can look back at these days and i can see a small smile coming to my face.

Life has been hectic over these days. I've been awake at hours I’ve never seen for a long long time(getting up @ 5:30 AM for yoga); sitting in classes with formal shirt and pants; sharing a hostel floor with members of the fairer sex; having birthday parties that go on till 3 AM in the night; sharing a small cake with 160 odd students; asking housewives about their favourite toothpaste; writing assignments in subjects that I'd never learned before in my life; analysing my own psyche in the dream world during classes; making PPT’s till 2 AM in the night; having coffee at 2 AM and on and on.

There hasn't been a point when I was sad or feeling that I had made a wrong choice. Living away from home isn't new for me and I’ve always felt at ease doing so. The trip to Delhi was the 1st time I was travelling by air. I had a good time. It was an early morning flight and even though I’d heard about the flight being the fastest and the safest means of travel until I travelled could I feel it. The flight wasn’t a pleasant experience as such because around me there were 3 families and all of them had small toddlers. One of these started crying and the others will follow as if in chorus.

After the flight I reached IIFT along with a friend from TVM, Ramakrishnan. He was a friend from college days and it was good to have someone along the 1st time here. We reached and got our rooms and I was on the 2nd floor. One among the 6 guys who shares the 2nd floor with 18 other girls. This looked like an opportunity at 1st but then later only we came to know that this is a threat. We guys are scared of keeping our reputations intact by being in this floor.

The classes started on 2nd July with the 1st class being Economics for me. It was a class that was interesting, and the prof was one genius who was giving out gyaan as if he was Adam Smith and we all were his greatest disciples. Some of us had the blank look on our faces when we got out of the class. But this look is better than the “I wanna sleep” look that we sport these days.

The classes are going on in full swing; but it isn’t classes that make the life in a B-School exciting. It is it the life, the senior-junior sessions, the interactions, the small chats, the long debates, the funny skits, the painful yoga lessons in the morning, the music that blares out of the speakers from the room that makes you wanna dance even if you can’t. All these things are what make life @ an MBA college worth living. The friendship, the camaraderie, the small joys, the midnight walks, the hot coffee’s shared, the poor jokes heard, the stories shared about had bosses and endless cribbing about the assignments and the case studies being handed out in classes like candies. All these things make life @ a B-School exciting. I'd heard a lot about this from my seniors who'd been to top colleges, friends who'd been to them and now I feel so special when I'm also telling my juniors and friends about these sleepless nights.

I just hope the 20 odd months that I’m gonna be here are going to be as exciting as the past 20 days have been. Life in MBA is just this one liner-Sleepless nights and Sleeping in classes.

Pagal Post

The below post is something i posted in PaGaLGuY.com in the IIFT final converts forum. Here's the original post link. Felt i should put it in my blog as well.

I personally feel good to have worked too the past 18 months. Coz i came to know a lot of things that i never knew as a fresher. One was regarding my knowledge in my subject and the most important was my skill of dealing with people. I worked(still working) in a chemical factory and there i never got the hi-fi life i dreamed. I dealt with people who're having little or no education but still masters in their craft. I feel its more difficult to deal with such people than with educated people. No offence to them, if they had better conditions when they grew up then am sure they'd have had a better career than me. I was more in the role of a facilitator, a sort of bridge between the top management which didn't deal with these workers directly, but used engineers like me to get the job done. I had lot of tough days, days when i thought why i chose this job instead of the software job i had got in Wipro. Each day i lamented about my decision to come here when some crisis happened in the factory. But then this enabled me to deal with crisis, one after the other over the past year i've learnt how to deal with problems that crop up without any notice. I feel the job has helped me know myself better. I feel more confident taking decisions.

Back in my college days the only such experience i had was when i was coordinator for my college's fest. That's the maximum exposure a small town guy like me could get in his college days. Those days i used to deal with people who're like minded, who're educated like me, who're having the same ideology; and i dealt with a few lakhs of rupees and that was a BIG thing for me back then. In my job i dealt with people who never got any extra incentive for doing a job in the night shift, and it was very very tough motivating them. In their eyes i was someone who earned a lot more than they ever will, just cause i did a few more years in college or school, when they were out earning a living. I dealt with equipment worth crores of rupees. I used to make purchases of machinery worth millions of dollars. I signed bills worth lakhs. I was 1st perturbed by the idea of people my dad's age or more calling me SIR. But i slowly gained their respect and they used to discuss with me more than just their factory problems. I became the young-guy-who-helps. I was invited to each and everyone of their functions, weddings, kids' birthdays and what not. But then I had a nagging boss who made me wanna quit this job each day. Even today while coming for lunch I was asked when i will be going by 4 men. They all had a sadness in their eyes when they spoke to me and had a pride in their face when they said "We'll tell the next batch that comes in that someone went for MBA from this office". I feel good about this fact. I feel good that i worked.

My friends in IIM's and other top colleges who got in the 1st time i wrote CAT were telling me how wrong they were to have entered without job-ex. Some of them struggled to get GREAT JOBS inspite of having excellent acad's(i mean 90+ all thru career), awesome extra currics and sports. I didn't say they didn't get jobs. They did get, but they never get the kind of DREAM jobs we hear about in the papers. So i feel good that i didn't get through any tests in my 1st and 2nd attempts and that i made it to IIFT this year. I hope to have a great 2 years ahead of me with batchmates like you.

Looking forward to it.

PS: This post isn't meant to counter anyone's stand or to demoralise anyone. But i thought i should say this out here.

Finally the long wait is over

Yes, the wait for getting into a prestigious institute for getting an MBA degree has culminated in my life with me securing admission to the MBA(International Business) course at Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT). The news came on 19th evening with the publishing of the list of selected students to the 2009-11 batch. I got in the list of students selected to the Delhi campus. I was in my room after coming back from work that day. My room mate was having night shift and was on the laptop doing what he does best(don't get me wrong, but he goes through financial news and chemical process updates; my guru in financial terms and funda's).

I had a feeling that the result would be out even though the IIFT official version was to wait till 20th. I came in and typed in the address and then changed. The site always was showing the GD/PI shortlist until then, but that fateful evening it showed something different. Something that looked so good to my eyes, but at the same time brought fear in my mind. Fear about the fact that, if i didn't make it, then i'll have to work for another year and i was sure i won't be able to prepare with the same fervour i had this time, thanks to my boss who's always on my @$$ to point out some mistake or the other. So with all those fears i downloaded both the lists, the one for the Delhi campus and for the Kolkata campus.

After downloading, i put in my name in the find bar, 1st time due to some error, my name didn't come up in the list and the search bar glowed RED. I was shattered; totally devastated and just got up and went to the balcony of my room, from where i get this wonderful view of the plant.


I know its not wonderful, but i was just standing there and was thinking what'll happen to my life in the coming year. At that time my roomie said the file's loaded fully and he could see my Name in the list. I jumped back into the room and confirmed with my own eyes that i'd got in. The list brought tears to my eyes. I called up my ex-girlfriend 1st and told her that the result is out, but i can't see it as the net connection here is too slow. But i guess she could understand from my happy tone that i made it. I called her up coz I'd promised that she'd be the 1st to know when the results are out. Next I jumped out of the bed and went to inform Debasis, my partner here for writing the mock cat's every Sunday morning. He was sleeping in his room, and was quite shaken, he was very happy that atleast one of us made out of this hell.

Then i called up my parents. My dad was home and he was very happy as well for me. But being the dad he is, he asked me if i was sure that i wanted to quit my so-called-well-paying job and go for this course. I said YES YES YES! I've had enough of this job, with a Chief Manager who's never satisfied with your work and constant maintenance issues in the plant. I had enough of the work already and i had even planned to quit the job after completing 2 years in it, and take up a lecturer's job in my home town if i hadn't made it to IIFT.

More about my MBA journey in another post. Till then let me just enjoy the glory :)