Students’ Speak: Internship is the best platform for Freshers to showcase their skills

By: Piyush Mittal

Internships play a crucial role in the life of engineering students from the perspective of getting a good start to their career. Piyush Mittal discusses some positives of taking up an internship during your course duration. He also mentions how students can secure good internships through both on-campus and off-campus drives.

An internship is a formal training cum official program for freshers or beginners who seek a career in a particular domain or profession. Primarily, the candidates get an opportunity to apply their classroom knowledge to actual real-world problems and can integrate the learning during an internship with their overall skill development. Internship helps you build a professional network and work towards gaining leadership position in an organization. Many skills such as problem-solving, leadership qualities and teamwork evolve better through an internship and all this knowledge and experience can be put to use in a full-time job role.

Some of the major recruiters and internship providers that visit our college include TCS, Jaro Education, Infosys, Genpact, Pinnacle, Accenture, BYJU’s, Cap Gemini, IBM, Wipro, Met cube and several more.

For BTech students, an internship of minimum 2-3 months is mandatory. An internship allows gaining hands-on experience with the knowledge and skills that students acquire during their classroom teaching. It offers an opportunity to understand the real-world problems and their solutions from a very close angle. Internship gives a platform to showcase your knowledge and skills, which can be a major confidence boost to many young students. It immensely enhances your abilities and helps develop a professional attitude towards work.

Students are usually shortlisted for internships on-campus based on their resume, the skills they are proficient in and the personal interview rounds. Internships can be picked-up off-campus also based on the resume, references and skills & certifications. The internship can be pursued during the summer, i.e. for two months or for six months, i.e. during final year between January and April. Many companies offer both summer internship and winter internship.

The projects undertaken during the period of internship, which can prove very beneficial during placements, are usually research-related projects. The project can focus on a particular domain of a particular department from any course. Students aim to come up with a solution to the various challenges in the existing process of any ongoing projects.  Deadlines are assigned by the company to complete the project.

You also need to file a report based on your findings, observations and solutions prepared by you. This helps students gain confidence and face the real-world scenario by working on a live project. Prior knowledge of handling projects always leaves a positive impression on the interviewer. Apart from doing the projects during the internship period, one can prepare or work on a live project under the guidance of college professors, based on your interest. Many projects undertaken during the internship period are related to the web development, programming languages or even something more specialised such as cloud computing.

Many companies provide both on-campus and off-campus placements and students can enrol themselves for the same after matching the required profile. The students are free to enrol themselves for the off-campus placement, as there are no restrictions. However, a student must follow certain rules, i.e. they can either enrol only with one company on-campus basis.  The Training and Placement Office arranges various training sessions for the students such as soft skills training, CRT programs, mock drives, aptitude tests, talent enrichment programs, industrial seminars, internships, etc.

About the Author:

Piyush Mittal is a final year student at Poornima University studying Bachelors in Technology with specialisation in Cloud Technology and Information Security.