INSIGHT, IIT-BOMBAY PRESENTS : THE INTERNSHIPS LIVE BLOG

Eight Weeks at IISc!

Three months of summer vacation is too much. Way too much. I don’t
have an eight-week intern imposition from insti. After all, I’m a
to-be thirdie

I’m spending eight weeks of this summer at IISc Bengaluru though. In
the Centre for Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences (yes, yes, my B.Tech is
in Civil Engineering). CAOS, it’s known as. I’m working on a project
related to the Bay of Bengal. My professor says this work (if
completed) will be appreciated by the Indian Meteorological
Department. Hehe. The idea of something I do being appreciated by an
institute of national importance is almost comical. Hehe.

Anyway, I got here through this Summer Fellowship Programme conducted
by the Indian Academy of Sciences. Details about that will be conveyed
later to interested people. They’re arranging my accommodation and
transport and paying me a stipend, so I don’t have to worry about much
in this (reasonably) badly connected city. Plus IISc is a nice place.
You know how we keep going on and on about big and jungle-like IITB
is? Well, let’s just say, IISc is bigger and is MUCH more of a jungle
than IIT is. And of course, no Tum-Tum or anything on those lines.
Poor ole me ends up walking a distance of H10 to H6 just to get a
meal. It’s all part of a ploy to keep their researchers healthy and
well-exercised. Speaking of which, the IISc gymkhana has welcomed my
friends and me into their Aerobics sessions. There’s nothing to do
where I stay, so instead of taking the first bus back (like I
religiously did in my first week here), I now hang around in the
gymkhana in the evenings. Just next to the gymkhana are these two
fancy auditoriums. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (the Art of Living Guru) was
here the other day. Ratan Tata came over two days after that. There
was this grand lunch arranged for IIScians that day. For the record,
summer fellows don’t count as IIScians. Needless to say, we snuck over
in typical Valfi-Coupons-Jugaad style. After that meal, I’m quite
convinced that IISc is rich. I mean, rich enough to organise such
stuff at a decent frequency for the whole insti. Shame it doesn’t
happen in IIT. The caterer wouldn’t know what hit him.

Anyway, a little about my work now. I’m forced to use Linux here;
something I was delighted to see the back of after my first semester
encounter with CS101. A little coding is also imposed on me, in a
software I don’t know, so my partner and I worked our way round that
by appealing to our sympathetic Project Assistant. As it turns out,
research is slow and pretty painful. It’s like trying to find your way
out of a dark room. You keep hitting things and trying new paths (and
in my case, counting the hours). I thought the world has come a long
way from such days, but apparently not. A lot of fields are still in
their infancy and crude methods are adopted there. Sort of surprised
me a bit. And there’s infi ghodagiri. (I’m SO glad I’m a summer fellow
and not an all-year-round Research Assistant). By the way, it’s also
my first encounter with a nine-to-six schedule, and I’m afraid I’m not
such a fan of it. Going to have to work my way round that when I start
working. Any ideas, people?

All said and done, I’m halfway through my stay here, and the slow,
peaceful life of IISc has sort of sunk in. I can’t say I love it..
it’s too slow and quiet (and lazy). Plus there’s no HN outside to keep
beat any blues. On the other hand, I don’t dislike it..it IS, after
all, peacefulMAX. And it keeps me busy in summer. And it’s always fun
exploring a new city and a new campus. Especially a city as cool
(climatewise ONLY) as Bengaluru, and a campus as beautiful as IISc’s.
Come to think of it, it’s almost like someone’s paying me to beat the
Bombay heat. Plus, I’ll be clearer on what I don’t want from life
once I’m done, right Moti?

A foreign intern, a US university, research work… there’s much to talk about. I’ll try to break it down.

So I am working at the Transportation Research Group (TRG), which comes under the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engg. Among the different fields of civil engg., I find transportation somewhat interesting. This interest was born sometime during the 3rd sem, and I have since forgotten the reason for it. I would have liked to work on a transportation project in a civil engg. firm but the only available positions were on the construction side of the projects and not on the design/planning side (and I didn’t have any inside contacts). So after receiving no replys to my mails/calls for a month, when the ban on foreign PT was lifted, I started applying. WSU’s was the first positive reply that came near the end of Jan. after which I stopped trying. It was too late to get anything at the good univs. anyway (or so I thought).

As an undergrad. intern, I always knew that not much would be expected from me and the work would be trivial at best. I hate to say this, and I certainly am not trying to generalize, but working as a ‘research scholar’ in a US university is even less stimulating than I’d imagined. I’ve been here two weeks and all I’ve done is collect data about seat belt usage on roads and enter it into excel sheets. It’s not research, it’s a project funded by the state’s Dept. of Transportation, in an effort to increase the seat belt usage rate. No doubt the project is important but there’s nothing much to learn and it’s mostly mindless labor. And its not just us interns (two of us from IITB), even the grad. and doctoral students here are doing the same thing for the most part. This will go on for another two weeks after which we’ll do something on crashes (road accidents). I don’t expect that to be much more interesting, but it’ll probably be better than this.

Work aside, this is my first trip abroad… so that’s cool. Its good to finally see for real what I’d only seen in movies and sitcoms. My workgroup consists of people from US, India and Bangladesh. It’s fun telling them about India, asking them about stuff…

Although Detroit is not a great place, and we haven’t seen much of it (no car, no proper public transport ), the weekends have been good. We visited Niagara falls and Chicago and both trips were awesome. I’d love to give details but this is not the place…

I guess this is it from me for now… more later…

Harsh

Yeah, I know. Funny name. Let me make a few things clear at the outset. The only reason I’m doing this internship is to fulfill the eight week requirement set forth by the institute. And how do I motivate myself to work? I want to ensure, by the end of my internship, that I know for sure things I DO NOT want to do in life.

So, moral of the story from the first two weeks, before you set out to get an intern, its important to know what you want out of it. I had no idea what SP did when I opted for it. It was only later that I realised that this firm was your local thekedar(contractor)-on the >30 crores scale.

Within the first hour, I was told I was in the wrong firm, given my structures major(I’m a Civil+Structures DD). But then, they were thinking I was serious about it :D. So anyway, this firm basically comes in when all the designing has been done, all the awesome visualisations of breathtaking structures made. When I say we put foundations to their castles made in the air, I’m not off the mark.

I spent my first week in the Tendering and Contracts department at the SP Head Office(Which btw is down the Road from the Taj Mahal Hotel, facing the sea, and has a breathtaking entrance). I pored over contracts and guidelines over and over again, which typically run into seven or eight books of two hundred pages each. I was supposed to read all of it. And read and read and read…I did so religiously for the first one and a half days of my intern. And then I started sleeping in a posture which, to everyone else, would look as though I was deep in concentration.

For most companies, interns aren’t important. And no one gives a *fish* about what you’re doing. Mostly, not even your boss. You have to be interested in what you’re doing. Otherwise its going to be one big bore. The onus is on you to go and pain people, ask them questions, not get cowed down when they kataofy you. Especially when they don’t pay you.

My case was the same. My overall training incharge, I must say, had planned things out really well though. But then, he was just going to play pick-and-drop with me. And I was going to have a new boss every week, in a different department. And in this dept., my boss, being the national head, had absolutely no time. He was there at 9(an hour before office time), stayed in his seat and worked during lunch, and was there when I left at 6.30. In fact, with his awesomely round figure and his perfectly snug fit with his chair, he seemed as though he was a part of their furniture at SPCL!

Traveling by locals wasn’t half as bad as I’d anticipated you know. You get on a train before 8.30 and catch a Thane bound slow one in the evening…you just don’t get any traffic on the way! And BEST is truly the best public transport system I’ve ever come across. Buses to and from everywhere!

All in all, dressing up in formals, getting them crunched in locals and buses, getting to work and willing the hours to pass themselves, waiting for the clock to strike 6.15-that was my average day. People at work were, well, they weren’t the brightest of the lot you know. I know I’m biased when I say this, but common sense is a rare commodity.