The Summer Ordeal

Ok so who ever is going through or has ever gone through a nightmarish internship (please include your engineering ones as well) should have a look at this experience

– Your internship is supposed to be taking place in a metro city, but you are miles away from any signs of civilization, OK there is a good guest house, but just outside it, is a place where people don’t understand that a toilet and a road are two different things altogether. You feel crappy to walk 3 kms to ur office at 11 am in the sweltering heat (btw that’s the office timing), when you wear your formals, hold ur heavy lappy-bag and walk through those dusty-shi**y lanes.. and yeah you walk because the company owes no responsibility for ur conveyance..and the location ensures that you won’t get an auto either, if sometimes you get a bus then you must be thankful to the great admin dept.

– You get no projects in the first 2 weeks, in those 12 days you go to ur mentor’s desk at least 30 times and each time he makes a typical face..takes 5 long mins to look up from his monitor.. and says “yeah we will meet this evening/morning/afternoon/ everything is fixed we are waiting for BOSS’s approval” and yeah he always says “I’ll call you” before diving back in to his monitor.

– OK 2 weeks over, you are frustrated with ur mentor so you contact those senior people whom you have seen in ur college, in those nice PPTs and selection interviews, distributing lots of goodies, giving gyaan about the company culture and the internship, looking ever so helpful. But what they do is that they call ur mentor, bash him up, reply to ur mail having all the top brass and ur mentor in the list and say “Don’t panic, we are shifting you to a new dept”.. Hurray! Tactically so awesome! N btw the new mentor and HODs are also in the reply list J

– Your new mentor doesn’t even look at you while you are being introduced to him by the HR, he says. “OK, he will work with XYZ” .. that’s it .. this XYZ himself is not a very nice person to start with

– As there is no place to sit in this new dept, you are sharing the seat with Mr. XYZ. Next morning he comes and the first thing he does is to unplug ur lappy power and put his mobile on charging, and points to a temporarily vacant cubic and tells you to shift there.

– Ohh! I haven’t talked about the work in the new dept. They hand you 2 crappy but ‘secret’ docs, you are not allowed to take them to your Guest House, each day you must submit them back to ur mentor. One day you do the same and then the mentor is off to a 2 day training, leaving you behind with nothing to work with

– Now you know that there is nothing much in the manuals, you take ur own initiatives to learn something.. you request to go to the store and see the things by yourself.. you do the same and meet the store manager on one evening. You go to the store (of course you go by local trains/auto) some days later early in the morning to see the store-opening processes. The guard questions you when you say that you are an intern (wtf is an intern? there are BOSSES, employees, temporary emloyees, contract workers.. but an intern ..aayla tum yahan training karne aaye ho), ur id-card doesn’t carry the company name and nyway its so pathetic that it is an insult even to the batches that school going kids wear these days. The manager is not there, and his deputy refuses you to observe the ‘secret processes’. You argue that you work with this n that team, but then you don’t have their phone nos, in fact they never gave you any. You try whatever other nos you had.. but yeah the company opens at 11:00 am and people are as helpful to their colleagues as Mr Mallya has been to Dravid n company throughout IPL. Absolutely frustrated, you walk out of the store, but yeah not before the guard frisks (yeah “FRISKS”) you and u could notice a hint of smile on his face( as if he is saying “looser..ho gayee teri training”)

OMG.. the list is never gonna end, But to complete the story, more or less all of this is repeated everyday in a never ending loop… but you see a ray of hope.. ohh its just a summer internship. Remember when sometimes you see those bad dreams..you missing an important exam, falling from a hight n all..and then you suddenly wake up to realize that it was just a bad dream. Sometimes you get a similar feeling with your internship.. you thank God that it is just an internship. I am so Lucky!! 🙂