The Great Indian Internship Struggle
The secret of getting ahead is getting started
Gone are the days when you land a lucrative offer immediately after your degree. Except if you come from the huge brand names of IIT’s, NIT’s or BIT’s landing a well paying job in a country with an abundance of engineers passing out every year is getting difficult by the day. This raises the demand for interning during the month to month and a half long breaks between semesters. There is an abundance of internship portals, offering a whole bunch of internships. However, these internships are offered for only two major domains which are relevant to computer science students, web development & Android development.
Most of these are offered by small businesses or startups trying to get a lot done for the least amount of money or better yet, for free. This makes it even more difficult for students who are actually interested to do something out of the stone age syllabus offered by most Engineering colleges.
Most students end up doing a quick Google search a week before summer/winter holidays hunting for easy portals to apply for an internship. But here’s the mess up, most of these portals offer the kind of internships I previously mentioned, extremely underpaying or unpaid. Again, this is not to say these internships are always bad, but 8 out of 10 times these jobs are not challenging & won’t make you gain any real knowledge.
This raises the obvious question of how to land an internship that is actually worth your time & energy.
The Early bird catches the worm.
Hunting a week before your vacations won’t be any good unless you’re lucky. Even with a very great resumé in hand, you’ll have to end up giving a couple of interviews before actually landing a good offer. Most of the times you’ll be having your exams going on at the same time before vacations. Starting a couple of months before helps.
Focus on quality & not quantity
Applying the same resumé application with copy pasted content found on the second Google search doesn’t really help. Channeling down your focus on a domain really helps. Example, I knew I wanted to get an internship related to networking. In this case, would putting my web development projects higher up in my resumé help? Probably not.
I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever. — Neal Barnard
As mentioned previously, the most famous portals for finding internships end up being the worst at times. Hundreds of students are applying for one or two posts per company. This puts you at a disadvantage. Not only in terms of competition but also, in terms of compensation. If you refuse to settle for 100 rupees, the company will find someone ready to work for 99. A very easy way to circumvent this and put yourself at an advantage is to network beforehand. LinkedIn really helps. Adding people from a company working in the same domain you wish to and asking them if you’d be a good fit for their company helps. Beware — Flooding your resumé to a whole bunch of random people who don’t know you at all would just make them block you and ruin your chances of getting into that company.
Fake it until you make it
With a few openings now available in data science, most companies would want you to be super comfortable almost every framework out there. This obviously isn’t possible unless you’ve been in the field since a while and in that case you wouldn’t need the initial break through. Most of these companies who end up putting every major framework out there in their profile description might not use each & every one of them but again, want the most bang for their buck out of you. Briefly researching about each one of them before your actual interview in most cases will be enough to get you in & then you’ve to show your potential, to pick up the required framework as and when you work. Hence a huge “what we expect from you” list should not detour you from applying to a company or position of choice. It’s just a matter of how good you’re able to sell yourself. This last point might sound unethical if seen in a wrong perspective. Do not apply for a field in which you’ve zero domain knowledge but just want to get in the hype train. In this case, you’re better off spending the holidays learning it, making a couple of projects & then applying later down the line.
Don’t sweat it
Even if you don’t land a good internship, there’s a whole plethora of things you can do in your holidays to make them productive. As a computer engineering student, you can end up doing projects in the field of your choice, contributing to open source projects, freelancing to name a few.
The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope. — Barack Obama
