Students’ Speak: My internship Experience

By: Anvita Rastogi

I have done 4 internships during my college, one with Motilal Oswal Securities Limited, one with Toolbox India Foundation, another one with My Captain and the last one with Barnes and Noble.

Internship is a one or two-month simulation of the real world, skill-building and enriching experience full of learning.

In St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, every student is expected to complete one internship during the Second Year -Third Year break. It is evaluated(graded) in the final marksheet.

We have a placement cell in our college which coordinates with various companies for final year placements as well as for pre-final year internships. The latter service provided by the cell is not very strong, only 5-6 companies come for internship placements. Students ty to get internships on their own. They use their parental contacts as well as professors help them to get internships using alumni network of the college. Apart from that, we use various platforms like LinkedIn, Internshala, LetsIntern, etc. to get an internship that complements our course.

To talk about my personal experience, I’m pursuing B.Sc Statistics. My course requires us to do an internship in fields dealing with data analysis. These usually include finance, research and development, market research, policy making and content analysis to name a few. I have done 4 internships during my college, one with Motilal Oswal Securities Limited, one with Toolbox India Foundation, another one with My Captain and the last one with Barnes and Noble Education.

My 2-month internship at Barnes and Noble Education as a data analyst was my final internship at the college level. I applied for it using Internshala. After my application was shortlisted, I was called for a face to face interview at their office in Andheri, Mumbai. I liked their work profile and their office environment and hence decided to accept their offer letter which I got from them after clearing the final HR round. The interview round was broken in two:

• The technical round, which included questions on tools and functions of MS Excel
• The HR round, which included resume questions and general personality accessing questions

 During the 2 months of internship, I faced various challenges. One of them being the compulsory working hours; every day I had to complete 8 hours at the office, I was not used to such strict timings and hence was frustrated initially but then my mentor told me to stick to it and try to learn as much as possible cause this learning will define my career trajectory. Following the advice I continued the internship. I was working on a project called Bartlyby.com, it was homework help and book solution website used usually in foreign countries. Initially, my work was to research and assign subjects to the book on their platform. After that, I was also asked to do perform competition analysis and quality analysis. The impact of my work directly influenced their sales and also their rating on google.

On the final day of my internship, my project manager, who also became my mentor gave me a farewell with his whole team. I was given a certificate and the stipend too which was promised in my offer letter.

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