AvantGarde

Although many believe that winter internship is a nice opportunity for the people with less exposure in corporate world to live and feel the culture, but I had different plans, I opted for a Start Up and luckily got a chance to work in a SIDBI incubated Company at IIT Kanpur itself.

I was rejoiced to have a chance to enjoy my stay (during Vacations) at IIT, the place full of opportunities, but at the same time, was feeling envy of my friends who decided to do their internships at their home towns. But as they say, to achieve something you have to leave something, everything has its own pros and cons but believe me it was no bad deal at all.

I was given a profile of business development, and to mention that “profile” is too short a term to describe the horizon of responsibilities you are expected to fulfill in a Start Up. Although luckily I had one of my batch mates as my team member (Team of two). So coordination required to achieve the desired goals in such a short time was not an issue.

Now without pouring in more words I will directly come to first day of the internship.

Oh…. I am sorry there is something before the first day as well – “Day Zero”, Yes we received a call a day before our joining, got a briefing mail about the product and were asked to make a sales presentation by using our MBA Insights. We reached the office next day after working on the task whole night and somehow managed to stand up to the expectations.

At the closing of ‘day one’ when we were thinking about the week long training session beginning from next day (supposedly), came another surprise: next task, “I want you to know the right approach for working in a Start Up, for this you are required to read a book and report after 24 hours” said our mentor and trainer (I will speak more about the person towards my closing lines) 300 pages in one day was not exactly what I was used to, still gave my best and reported back with 1/3 part still remaining. But thankfully our mentor did not expect us to complete it either, and with a loud remark “This internship is not going to be easy” our training session started. We were told we could enjoy the work from home facility on which I started dreaming of the extra activities available because of the time flexibility available (again supposedly).

Happiness to have the freedom of working according to my time disappeared at the pace it came. Soon the task made us forget about the normal concept of 8 hours working schedule and we started working on double shifts to complete our basic training, so that we could start with our final goals. With the tasks flowing rapidly and data being collected in abundance I found how important can a simple tool like “Trello” or “Evernote” become if you know how to use the resources efficiently.

After the completion of our training sessions at Kanpur it was time to know the market sentiments as well as analyze  the difficulties and expectations of our expected customers. For this we decided to observe the market space personally and planned to visit parts of Uttar Pradesh, National Capital Region  (NCR), Punjab and Haryana and further divided the demographics into various market segments to have a holistic view and decide upon the strategies to make our product more valuable for our customers.

Very excited to meet the Directors and Chancellors of various educational institutions, (as the product is developed to improve the education sector of the nation) we prepared the agenda and planned the route map in which we were to cover the prospects of our study.

But we forgot to visualize and involve the most important person in the whole process

Although thankfully the company, being incubated at SIDBI, IIT Kanpur and also being awarded by MHRD, along with our personal skills helped to execute our visits smoothly.

After completing the first phase at Uttar Pradesh the next stop was NCR region and with most of my friends staying at Delhi, I thought it would be a great week and opportunity to enjoy few joyous evenings along with the work. But on the first day itself when; while returning from work, I promised my friends to meet them after a 20 min nap and woke up straight in the next morning with about 15 missed calls on my cell phone, it was clear “This internship is really not easy”. But thankfully I had some great time with my friends on Sunday.

And also, we got a chance to visit our homes, as the last phase included the market study at our hometowns.

With the completion of our visits, we learnt how geographical demographics and other market segmentation can bring in changes to the way your product is perceived and also how expectations of customers may vary in spite of belonging to the same segment of industry. We also learnt how to implement theoretical knowledge to get useful results and at the same times how different the theories can be from the practical situations.

In the summarizing lines, I would like to thank the company for giving us the chance to work with them and providing a great learning platform. I would also like to thank our Guide and Mentor who not only trained us but helped us to overcome the problems we faced and kept us motivated by adroitly using reprimands and appraisals.

By- Manpreet Singh