When Sameeksha Mishra was placed in Google for a summer internship, she was on cloud nine. Little did she know that she would not be able to experience the “office culture” that Google is known for. As the country went into lockdown, anxiety took over. But eight weeks after working virtually with the company, she says it was one the best experiences of her life. Mishra, a student of MICA Ahmedabad, who worked as a Capabilities Intern with Google, said, “The HR team worked round the clock to make sure we felt welcomed and appreciated. I was ecstatic, to say the least, and every day was a new challenge or beginning of something even more exciting. My hosts tried their best to make sure that I have the best experience possible, from introducing me to the team to keeping me involved in a way that multiplied my learning.”
She added, “The truth is I was not expecting to be this amazed as, after all, it was a virtual internship, and this was the first time Google tried this out. My learning has been amazing and the curveball that was Covid eventually made me even more confident in myself.”
Major milestone
For B-school students, the summer internship in the corporate world is a major milestone that exposes them to real-life projects and tasks in industry. However, the unprecedented situation of Covid-19 and the lockdown across the nation resulted in remote working for a two-month-long online internship for students. More than 200 MICA students were placed in varied roles across different industries. Some of the recruiters included Bajaj Auto Ltd, L’Oréal India, PUMA, Swiggy, Publicis Groupe, Redbus, HP Inc. and many more.
Irrespective of the remote working conditions, the companies did their best to keep the interns engaged, making this internship experience as wholesome as it could get. Another student, Heema Joshi, who interned with PUMA India and was responsible for creating the company’s new-age content strategy for Instagram and designing a digital activation for product launch, said, “I worked with the Digital and Brand Marketing team and, despite the remote internship, the company made sure we would experience the culture in its fullest form by organising fitness workshops and seminars and interactions with senior leaders. Our mentors encouraged us to think outside of the box. It was an enriching experience.”
Unique learning processes
Shashank Jyotishi
For Kuldeep Rajpurohit, who interned at a leading e-commerce platform, the challenge of working from home was real. “A task that could have been completed within a couple of hours on the floor, took almost a day, owing to the delay in communication. However, a big positive came out of this. It pushed me to do most of the learning part by myself. To save time, I explored the requisite tools, making mistakes and learning from them. I also studied SOPs and other relevant documents to accomplish my tasks efficiently. My mentor was supportive, which provided me the boost to deliver on all the KPIs effectively”, he said.
Sharing his learnings, Shashank Jyotishi said, “Because of the pandemic situation, and the country-wide lockdown, I had to join my internship ‘virtually’ in a corporate firm in the second week of April. I got to learn to manage critical and reassuring communication with stakeholders. I was given opportunities to generate and execute ideas in a direction that the firm could pivot to while keep enduring rough times. What I learned in these tough days would not have been possible in a normal internship situation.”