INSIGHT, IIT-BOMBAY PRESENTS : THE INTERNSHIPS LIVE BLOG

We’d conducted a survey to gauge a few parameters of  the internships done by the students of IIT-Bombay. The results are as follows:

Introduction

The London School of Economics (LSE) offers certified summer courses in various subjects ranging from economics and finance to management and law, for a period of three weeks. The summer school, which begins in the first week of July, has around 5000 students from various parts of the world, majorly from India, China and the US. The application procedure and other details can be found on its website: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/summerSchool/Home.aspx.

In Class

There are three levels of courses, which run in the same way as full semester ones. Most 1st and 2nd level courses do not require any major prerequisites. The teaching pattern is similar to ours. But with three hour lectures, supplemented with one hour tutorial sessions daily, each day represents a week of lectures at IIT. Professors are generally good and provide a enjoyable learning experience. This city campus is not very big but is still well-equipped, especially the library. Apart from classes, LSE also organizes public lectures delivered by renowned speakers. The course tuition fee is 1,100 pounds.

Outside Class

Major hangout spots include two pubs within the campus itself. LSE, located in central London, is at walking distance from the River Thames and close to many major landmarks of the city. LSE also has its own accommodation facilities with walking distance from the campus. Other accommodation options in London can also be availed. There are student union disco parties every Friday night on campus LSE also organizes a River Boat Disco party on the River Thames. Apart from that, London and its famous nightlife provide a lot of scope for having fun.

Overall

Insightful interactions with students from various backgrounds and countries, an enjoyable in-class experience and the life in the city itself, make the overall LSE experience simply awesome.

On finding that none of my contacts were fruitful in ensuring an internship at a Tech company, and on receiving a few no-fund replies from foreign universities, I decided to give the IIMs a shot. I was happily accepted at IIM Bangalore for a marketing research internship.

The IIM Bangalore Campus:

The campus is very small but has better per capita infrastructure than our Institute. No two place are more than 5 minutes away on foot. The hostels are quite decent with cozy, single occupancy rooms, 24 hour LAN, washing machines and internal phones on each floor. The atmosphere is really peaceful and the surroundings green and clean. The only problem is the lack of a proper canteen! They have Amul, Tata Tea and CCD outlets but you can’t have sandwiches at Amul everyday — although that’s what we had to do for two months! (yes, there were 5 others from the Institute at IIM-B). And dinner was always at some roadside restaurant outside campus. Seriously I would have been bored to death had it not been for our weekend “lukkhas” with others from the Insti doing their interns all over Bangalore. Other than Bangalore we had covered Ooty, Mysore, Pondicherry and Hogenakkal, each on separate weekends.

The Work:

I was supposed to be working on a case study on Aptech’s business strategies which was supposed to be completed in 8 weeks but due to Aptech’s other commitments it got delayed. So basically I was left doing “arbit” and random stuff. Most of the time was spent on reading subject matter and writing summaries. This wasn’t bad because it definitely gave me a good exposure towards marketing but there wasn’t any tangible gain.

Overall, it was a nice experience especially because of the weekend outings and I got a feel of what management was all about.

BACKGROUND

This summer, I completed an internship at a firm known as “Nomura” as part of the Change Management Team (CMT). Before I get into the details of what the CMT is and, I’d like to provide some background on the company itself. Primarily operating in Japan, Nomura is an Investment Bank that came to the global forefront after its acquisition of the European and Asian Operations of Lehman Brothers, the Investment Bank that went bankrupt in September, 2008. Lehman operated a Captive Unit in Powai, Mumbai which mainly serviced the European and Indian Front Office Operations of the Firm. Under this deal, the Powai entity was also to be taken over by Nomura. Nomura themselves had no presence in India prior to this.

To service their large, not to mention very profitable front offices, such companies set up Operations Divisions consisting of Middle and Back Offices, Finance and IT, which execute processes that are continuously running behind the scenes. Captive units opened in developing countries such as India represent a major cost arbitrage to these Firms, who can save as much as 50% by simply moving (read outsourcing) their operations here. The Powai Office itself has a strength of 2500 Full Time Employees (FTEs). Note that apart from the above mentioned support divisions, Powai also has an Investment Banking Centre, where one can find Front Office Investment Bank work outsourced, a Global Markets centre, where one can find Equity Research, Equity & Fixed Income Quants, Structuring Teams (as those mentioned by Pupun & Rohit). For that matter, these are the teams which guys from the IITs and IIMs join. Lehman also had an India Front Office in Worli mainly dealing with Indian Investment Banking and Trading/Sales. I am not aware of any person from an IIT who worked there immediately after graduation.

THE ROLE OF CMT

Now given the scale of these operations, the split of work between the Regional & India offices, the continuous new stream of work being migrated, there exists a clear business case for the CMT. Who are parts of CMT and what do they do? CMT has three sub-divisions - Transitions, Business Analytics and Quality. Transitions, deals with deciding which new processes are to be “transitioned” from the Region to the Powai Office and also seeing these through till they are performed in Powai as Business as Usual. Business Analytics assists operations with the implentation of any Process Improvement projects. Quality (which is the team I was part of), deals with understanding processes, their core & auxiliary aspects, and identifying areas of improvement. In other words, CMT is essentially an inhouse consulting group comprising of Six Sigma Master Black Belts (the highest formal educational qualification in consulting) and Business graduates (MBAs) who are substitutes for large consulting firms like Opera, Deloitte and the like. Essentially, CMT is the in-house consulting group with different functions of the Operations division as its clients. Also notice the similarity between Manufacturing Processes and Financial Processes. The entire concept of a Quality team is borrowed from the Manufacturing Industry. And, as it turns out so are most of the people. You can find ex-ITC, ex-P&G and ex-GE people working in this team after having performed similar tasks in the manufacturing sector.

What does CMT do? Due to the very scale and split of operations/IT, there exist many situations, where improvements maybe possible, either in the processes itself or in systems. CMTs role is to identify these opportunties by in-depth studies, suggest changes and lead any initiatives which are begun as a result. As it turns out, most of these projects require specialized knowledge – they cannot be done without knowledge of the process which only comes with having worked on the process first hand. As a result CMT also has to drive participation of line managers in these initiatives, without which, they cannot be done. In management lingo, this is what is known as “Project Management”. For the same reason, it is strongly advised to join a role in a quality team after one has gained some experience in the field, the requisite people skills and analytical mindset. In an ideal world, one would not need a CMT. But as it turns out, Process Managers in Operations tend to be very occupied (to say the least) in their day to day routines. In absence of strong leadership and mandates, they fail to devote time to activities such as this, to the extent that they don’t perceive value in the initiatives at all. Thus, the CMT comes into being. It tends to be a team leveraged by Senior Management to drive large scale changes in parts of the organization.

IN CONCLUSION

However, the criticisms of CMT are similar to those of consulting – lack of understanding of the practicalities of the business, theoretical improvement schemes, not practically implementable and the like. But in the right company, having the right mandates and senior management support, the work can be a great value addition.

I was really surprised by the fact that an internship/project in IITB could be tremendously fun and a brilliant learning experience. While everybody else was busy traversing greener pastures in Europe, I was working (also, chilling at Prithvi with batch mates) on my project in IITB. Everyone around me thought I was demented to do an internship in the Institute especially since I had been to ISB and LSE the previous summer.

The reason for my staying back in the Institute was largely due to the following factors:

a) My department made it compulsory for us to do an aero-internship and I didn’t have the guts to get a “farjee” or a fake certificate.

b) My professor made me an offer I couldn’t refuse; he said to me  — “You complete this project and you will definitely have a publication to your name”. This got me carried away and I started building castles in the air with thoughts ranging from how future generations would search for my name on Scopus for my research work, to how I actually contributed positively to the field of science after 3 years in IIT. Primarily it was about the fact that I could enjoy how much ever I wanted and do work at my own speed with no pressures and tensions.

My professor made it very clear in the first week that I could work as much as I wanted and that there was no need for a hurry.  While most people would see this as the opportunity to cut slack and relax, I took this opportunity to learn and sharpen my skills as much as I possibly could.

The project was titled “Flame propagation in radial micro-channels” and dealt with simulating flames in radial micro-channels. The projected involved numerical methods, coding on C++ and usage of plotting software (I used this brilliant plotting software called DPlot). The numerical method used for the simulation was the Predictor-Corrector method and I had used it for 100,000 grid points for varying time cycles ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 time cycles. I had initially worked on a 1D case and then perfected the code so that it could be implemented for a 2D case. While coding for the 1D case was easy, the 2D case was tricky and I had to use all the help I could get from the few CS junta to make the code efficient and look better. Eventually code ran without glitches and generated interesting results which are being investigated further and I will be working on this through the current semester.

This was my first attempt at research and I enjoyed it. This was largely because of the  stress free environment I got to work in and also because of the continuous motivation from my professors’ end. Contrary to most peoples’ belief that the institute is a “boring” place to work in, I found it to be the best place to work in.

In addition to the work, I spent countless hours watching plays in Prithvi, on a couple of treks, lazed around, chilled with friends and went to town every weekend. It was possibly one of my best summers.