Category: Summer Internship Experience

For most of us, the summer internship is probably the most coveted thing in a B-school of course, after the final placements. All the learnings, PORs, late-night hustles converge to one thing; to land upon the best possible internship offer. The importance of this summer internship was altogether more necessary for someone like me who hails from a research background with no actual corporate experience.

However, destiny had other plans and the pandemic made its best efforts to snatch away this experience. But amidst all the turmoil, OfBusiness orchestrated a work from home program so that we do not lose out on our Summer Internships. Before I take you through my journey at OfBusiness, let me give you a small brief about the organisation. Launched in January 2016 and based out of Gurugram, India, OfBusiness is a technology-driven financing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It caters to a very niche segment and adds value to the businesses of SME’s by aggregating Raw Material and providing financing for the same while reducing their open market credit cost. In short, the essence of its business model is very eloquently expressed by Mr. Ashok Mohapatra, CEO, “OfBusiness provides financing to buy raw material from Ofbusiness.”

Albeit a start-up, the precision with which the induction was carried out was commendable. In a short span of three days, we were made adept with the working of different functional teams, business model, and the art of persuasion which comes very handy for a sales-driven company. It all seemed pretty overwhelming at the start but in time things started to make more sense. The motto was to make a lot of mistakes, make them faster, and learn from them even faster.

I was inducted into the Mumbai sales team under the tutelage of Mr. Avinash Pandey and Mr. Rahul Nayak. I am responsible to study the infrastructure sector in the Western Industrial Belt and consequently generate leads for BG lending. With the help of my team, especially Rahul Nayak, I was able to lay down a full course of action for the next 8 weeks. I studied the Western Industrial belt and segregated that into two regions: Maharashtra and Gujarat corridor. After that, I moved on with the state of Maharashtra, where I identified several departments associated with the infrastructural activities with the help of the Maharashtra Government directory. Then we arranged these departments based on their work volume and value to determine their primary creditworthiness with the help of our very own e-tender platform, BidAssist. Parallelly, I had numerous sessions to learn about financial products, financial and credit risk analysis and lead generation. I got introduced to a lot of financial and banking jargon which was previously alien to me. Concepts like Purchase financing, Fund Based limits, Non-Fund Based limits (Bank guarantee, Letter of Credits) became crystal clear in the process.

Then began the most important part of the internship: lead generation and cold calling. This was the most challenging part since I was working on a sector that was not explored at OfBusiness and I had to start from scratch but Rahul always pushed me to believe in the process that we have laid down. So, in the renewable energy domain, we focussed on the wind farm developers, solar EPC companies and small hydropower plant developers in Maharashtra. I gathered a healthy lead base and then performed a financial analysis of the companies to determine the stretch in the working capital cycle and to back these findings I even connected with the suppliers to determine the payment terms

Since then I have worked on four sub-sectors in the Energy department covering the renewable domain and the industrial utilities and in the process, I have made over 300 calls to clients and suppliers. Things seemed rough at times but my team always had my back. I would constantly share my experience with the team to improve my pitch so that I could make a better call the next time.

It would be too farfetched to say this right now but I have come a long way during these two months. I started off as a very shy guy but now I have gathered a lot of confidence and experience. In fact, this small stint has given me a lot of insights into the Energy sector and the confidence that I can replicate the same in any sector or domain. The journey is far from over and I still have to go a mile before I have my final break but the experience so far has been no less than a fairytale and, during this small time, I have had the opportunity to meet some amazing people in the process who have guided me on my journey so far. I also got the opportunity to work with the social media and design team on a few projects.

Like I said, there’s a lot of ground still left to cover but now I have the skills, confidence, and guidance to make it to the finish line.
–
Sunil Swain, Summer Intern, OfBusiness
Class of 2021 | IIM Kashipur

Interning at ICICI Bank has been a fortunate and great learning experience. In these unprecedented and uncertain times, it’s a great opportunity to be a part of such an organization. Even in this chaos, it provided us with all the support and never made the virtual internship feel like as if it was a compromise or just an obligation. It started with the virtual onboarding of all the interns across B-schools and interactive sessions with various officials in leadership positions and the plan for the next 8 weeks was well laid out. Since then the buddy and mentor have been constant guides in this journey who helped at every roadblock and bottlenecks that came in the way.

The interns were assigned some of the best live projects at ICICI in various domains be it HR, Strategy, Marketing, Analytics etc. Working on these live projects helped me understand how it’s like to be working in the organization and what role different people play in different positions. This gave us a better clarity of the role, the challenges, and the expectations from that role.

My project was about finding the Dark Data present in the bank and to generate business use cases for the same. This project was a mix of strategy and analytics and is especially important in today’s world as data is all around us. It becomes much more important to find out the dark data in the organization because experts estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the data in any organization is unstructured and the amount of unstructured data in enterprises is growing significantly, often many times faster than structured databases are growing. Moreover, according to an analysis by Harvard Business Review, less than half of an organization’s structured data is used in making business decisions, and less than 1% of unstructured data is used in any way at all. So, we can see we have such a huge database (in exabytes) in the organizations that goes totally unused and what can be the results in terms of profits if this data is put into use. I worked on finding out the dark data present in particular products under trade finance and seeing as to what the applications of that data in the banking sector could be. The project also required to identify the vendors that could help ICICI in structuring the unstructured data that we have and reaching out to them to identify the vendor who can meet our requirements.

The project gave clarity of how it is like to be working in the Banking Industry, understanding the different products and jargon of banking, and how the system as a whole is functioning. The internship provides a platform for the B-school candidates to put the theoretical knowledge gained during classes into practical applications. The courses taught in IIM Kashipur have been helpful and relevant to find insights on the project. Various tools that were taught like SPSS, Power BI came extremely handy to derive insights and finally present the output. The internship has been a truly enriching experience in terms of the insights it gives about the industry and the expectation from MBA graduates once they join organizations as full-time employees after a year. Moreover, it also provides students with a chance to hone their skills and improve upon the weak areas which they might have felt during the internship in the final year to come ahead.

Apart from this, the campus team kept everyone engaged during these 8 weeks even in these unusual times by arranging various sessions with the people in leadership positions, keeping short quizzes at the end of each week on some topic related to banking, making themed templates which made people interact with each other and kept the interns engaged which never made us feel like that we had missed out on something.
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Parul Gupta, Summer Intern, ICICI Bank
Class of 2021 | IIM Kashipur

Amid pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about my commencement of Internship but Hafele onboarded us seamlessly and tweaked the projects to best suit the virtual mode of internship. Hafele India is a consumer durables company that is into categories like Architecture Hardware, Appliances, Lighting, to name a few. My role is more on the product side that demands analysis of the product features, competition analysis, and product gaps on a broader level.

On the 21st of May, I completed one month of internship and it has been an enriching journey so far. I got an opportunity to see the hardware industry so closely. I frequently get a chance to interact with the internal sales team and product team to understand much about the product. The market insights I get from them about the products are priceless. One such example is product packaging. Though I read about the importance of the product packaging in the curriculum, I realized and could relate to it more when I interacted with internal teams. There are many such examples. Moreover, it completely changed my way of looking at any product. Now, when I see any hardware product, many questions pop up like what are its testing standards? Who are its competitors?

Additionally, I am also working to devise a digital media strategy for Hafele franchises. This is completely new to me because I never explored this side of marketing. But I feel this is where summer internships really help, exploring uncharted territories and learning new things. We also get a chance to learn by executing them in real-time. Overall, it has been a cherishing journey so far. I am pretty excited for the second month in the journey as more deliverables are at hand to deliver.
–
Chaitanya Sunkishala, Summer Intern, Hafele India Private Limited
Class of 2021 | IIM Kashipur

Amidst all the chaos due to the Covid-19 pandemic, TATA Capital has ensured a smooth transition to the Virtual mode of Summer Internship. I am currently working with the Commercial and SME Finance Division (CSFD) which comes under TATA Capital Financial Services Limited. My project is to work on the initiatives from the COO’s office and try to generate more business opportunities.

My internship started with the study of the NBFCs in our country and doing several analyses of the same. I felt that the Classroom interaction with the faculty and the case-based pedagogy of IIM Kashipur eased this part for me and I was able to channel my thoughts in the right direction for the study. In the last month I have worked on analysing the leads and opportunities for different sales verticals and how the organization can improve its conversion to get more business. It also involved studying the performance of different products offered by TATA Capital after 2015 and improving them.

Before joining the organization, I was informed by my manager that my role won’t be just limited to the CSFD team but that I will also get to explore TATA capital and work with the various sales team. As a part of the cross-team venture, I worked on designing the policy and system to avoid the generation of duplicate leads with my manager. As the lockdown period has been extended several times, the businesses are not able to operate and the banks are focusing on the collection part. But we sometimes forget our old and reliable customers, I am currently working on analysing the business and industry of our old customers for the generation of revenue. It involves choosing the right customer and strategizing an approach to work on those customers.

Virtual Office does restrict the interaction with the business head, but the HR team at TATA Capital organizes several webinars and conferences to ensure that we get to clarify our doubts and get in touch with executives from various verticals of the TATA group. Also, we have knowledge sharing sessions with our fellow interns from prestigious B-Schools of the country so that we also get to know about their project and how are they handling it. The aim of this is to develop bonding as a team and build a strong network with other people which I feel is the crux of any summer internship program.

After working for one month these were my key learnings:

• Get a good hold on all the subjects taught in the first 3 trimesters as the company expects you to be thorough with the basics of every domain.
• Explore the organisation and its working and gather more information on how is the business generated by the company.
• Knowledge of Excel will always be handy no matter which domain you work for.
• Asking questions and getting doubts cleared. Senior executives are more than happy to interact with new employees and want to impart their experience to us.

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Aditya Shekhar, Summer Intern, Tata Capital
Class of 2021 | IIM Kashipur