First week of Summer Internship

4th April 2005

I enter the office of VJIL Consulting Ltd. with trepidation. From what I had been told about my project, it was to be an assignment in IT, something about implementation plan for FileNet…I had been told to learn about FileNet in detail by my Guide. Tried a lot but still was not able to understand much.
Reached the office at 9am sharp, no sign of my guide or the HR or whoever who would know that I had to be there. Finally at 12pm walks in the HR lady, gives us (me and sujith aka auntie..the other intern with me at VJIL) a stack of forms to fill. The forms seem badly reminiscent of the Summer Placement Process itself, questions on strengths, weaknesses, career goals and so on and on. We were also shown to our cubicles, mine is just in front of our guide’s...:)
After all this we finally get to meet our guide, Bhanu (an IIMA alumni, batch of 1996), I was just hoping he doesn’t start by asking me about FileNet, thankfully he doesn’t….on the contrary he starts chatting about IIMA in general, our life at IIMA and about our interests et all.
Finally comes up the topic of our projects and he says "what we discussed during the interview was just to select people we wanted…..now you have to see what you are interested in, working in an IT consultancy doesn’t mean you have to work on IT projects or stuff, you can work on whatever you want, Marketing, Finance, HR, Operations anything".
Now this was something, I was pretty sure I wanted to do something in marketing and so I told him……
The rest of the day was spent in thinking about what I really wanted to do and in doing some more research on the company’s operations and stuff (so much so at the end of the day I knew everything that was there on the Company site by heart…:))

5th April 2005

We get our first assignment something about a template for a Capability Document for the IT services division of the Company basically to be used as a pre-sales document. Was oh so thankful to WAC for this…if not for WAC and the company report at the end of the last term..this task would have surely taken a lot more time than the time we actually took.

6th April 2005

Bhanu calls us to his cubicle. He tells us that he wants us to get experience on a whole range of things and so will be making us do some 3-4 assignments.
And so came our first major assignment, "Market Size estimation for IT training industry in Hyderabad". Seems to be a simple task. But then we realize we haven’t got any of our marketing texts or notes, hadn’t expected a marketing assignment in the least. Start frantically calling the other WIMWIans in Hyd, finally get Bharati, and ask her for her books…whattay relief.

7th April 2005

Start work on the assignment, haven’t been able to pin down the VJInfo (the Education Services Division of VJIL) director till now. Finally able to do so at 7 in the evening and end up spending close to 12 hours in the office…Phew

8th April 2005

Work and work and work………………
And also answering queries from some frantic future facchas..:D

That’s that for the week……looking ahead to a peaceful and fun filled weekend..:)