Sunandinee Mehra – KPMG

Sunandinee Mehra – KPMG

Hey, I’m Sunandinee Mehra, a 3rd-year undergraduate from the civil department. This summer, I concluded my internship at KPMG and this blog is all about my experience leading up to, and during the internship.

December 2021
I’d recently come to campus for the first time after completing three online semesters. Having no experience of the real ‘chill’ campus life I was majorly exposed only to the rat race environment that the online semester had pushed us into – so much so that I knew people who did an internship not only in the summer but also in the winter after our third semester, which, mind you, was the first proper break we’d got in the past year and a half. So come mid-December, full of hope and blind vigour, I started apping; spoke to seniors, made a checklist, installed extensions and apps and readied mail templates to send to my list of target companies and professors and then the final step – cold mailed and LinkedIn spammed them. This mindless craze of securing an internship ASAP soon ended though, thank God, and once the semester started I calmed down and focused on that again. True, the ignored emails and seemingly positive leads that only ended in rejection hurt. True, the impactless reminder mails seemed like a crushing waste of time. And true, spending the entire winter doing nothing seemed like a glorious sin. But honestly, I think it was all for the better.

March 2022
Done with midsems I figured I’d give another shot at apping. I had no connections of my own to secure a good 2nd year internship, and the roles offered by PT Cell were either not of my interest or not open to me at the time, and I did not have the time to sit around and wait for them to come to me. I suppose I had two reasons for wanting an internship this time. One, obviously, because by some means or another most around me were pursuing one. And secondly, I had no clue what I wanted to do. Absolutely zilch. All I did know was that if I was investing my summer in an internship, it’d have to be in a decently good company (call it over ambitious and cocky xD) simply because if not, then I always had the alternative of using those months to learn something meaningful myself (this honestly seems more ambitious to me given how we all fall prey to never completing online courses, but oh well). With all this in mind, I again set down the path of apping to see where it goes.

April 2022 – Bingo
Honestly, I’d say I got lucky. That’s a major factor at least. Of the 300 odd mails I’d sent that got absolutely no one to bat an eye, one little mail did. An associate director at KPMG found it interesting that an IITian was looking for an internship opportunity under his sector of financial services, and ironically, set up a call with me with a mindset to actually reject me but just give me a little time and not cut me off directly via mail. Ultimately I suppose he realised he could do with an extra pair of hands in his office. And I suppose that thus somehow, of the ~300 mails spammed by a clueless, experience-less sophie from the civil department, one of them hit the mark.

May to June, 2022 – The actual experience
My internship started on the 2nd of May, for a period of two months. It was in a hybrid manner with occasional visits to the office. The days I did physically go to the office were exponentially more fun – but also exponentially more draining, and soon I somewhat got a flavour of the ‘corporate’ life. My role involved majorly assisting the team in their ongoing projects and working independently on one internal project, so I cannot say I did something major through the internship, but I’d say I learnt and was exposed to much more than I otherwise would have been. I had the opportunity of a client and bank branch visit, through which I got a close look at how audits work, at the financial concerns and risks faced by companies, and a whole lot of PowerPoint and Excel.

My key takeaways from the entire experience would include somewhat understanding the culture and responsibilities that corporate life instils in you, getting a closer look at what consulting and financial system audit really imply, and meeting a whole new group of some very interesting and hardworking people. Oh and discovering the Instagram account @consultingcomedy, full of facts fr.

TL;DR
Lastly but most importantly, do not, absolutely do not stress over getting a 2nd-year internship. It’s a good addition for sure, but by no means is it an essential part of your insti life or resume. Genuinely enjoy the internship process if and when you feel like it’s the right time for you to enter the field, things will work out in ways you’d never expect :p