One thing that my seniors told me a lot of times before my third year started was to increase my CGPA. However, how to do that, was never told to me. So, being an honest, shy and innocent person, I did not have a great CGPA when I was to be selected for a company to do my industrial training in. Professors told us that the company does not matter, but the work does, but they forgot to add that some companies do not offer good work. Hence, it boiled down to the previous assumption, that some companies are good and some are bad and as a matter of fact, people with higher grade point averages are selected in better companies than the ones with low averages. Same was true with me. So, if you are a low CG guy and are looking for guidance, you are on the right article. If you have a high CGPA, then you may well skip this one, but something tells me you won’t, just to be sure you do not miss on anything useful, the secret for your CG.

So, I had my internship in a small software company based in Bangalore. I got it in Batch Run, an escape route for people who are not found suitable for any other company and are hence selected on the basis of CGPA and preference. My company’s name was Tatvik Technologies Pvt. Ltd. It consisted of only four employees and they worked out of a small flat, which need not necessarily be called an office. So, the very first thing I realized was that I will get no exposure to work environment or office culture. There were four internees there, who were seated in a room on a round table, with air-conditioner and an attached bathroom, a room which I suppose should have been the bedroom of the person who might have been living there. We worked eight hours a day and ate south Indian food in lunch at a nearby restaurant. They were paying me ten thousand rupees per month, which was surprisingly high for a person to have gotten an internship through batch run.

I was working on Graphic User Interface Design of new software they were making. I had no idea of what to do, as it required no knowledge of my electrical engineering fundamentals. I had to figure out how to do before what to do. So, a bulk of my intern went waste in learning rather than doing. We were fortnightly checked for our work and our progress and no one ever told us to seed our work or make it better. As I said, there was no work culture in the company did not expect us to do anything special for them in the two months we spent there. They were just exposing themselves to us, so that we may get interested in working for them after our graduation. It was a start-up and it is was just to have this kind of a mentality for them.

I found the experience of the internship a little satisfactory, a little frustrating and a little boring. Despite being in the most awesome weather possible, I did not enjoy 9 hours of work everyday. Probably that is the kind of a thing you learn at  your intern, to learn how to adjust and get ready for the bigger and tougher game of life, of which we were only seeing a glimpse of before it.

Dipesh Mittal
Electrical Engineering B.Tech
4th Year