Himank Gupta – ISB Hyderabad

To set up context for this blog, I pursued an internship at the Indian School of Business in December, 2022 (the vacation after my third semester). I remember reading blogs that seniors had written before I started thinking about doing an internship, and they were super helpful. Having benefited from their experience, I hope to be of some help to my juniors.

I’m thinking of dividing this blog into four parts:
1. Why I applied?
2. How I applied?
3. The actual internship experience
4. My two cents

Why I Applied for Internships then?

I can’t recall the exact thought process but as far as I can remember, it started with the Placement Team wanting sophomores to submit a resume in September. It was very confusing at first, and the idea of making a resume was daunting. It was at this time that Career Cell conducted a resume making and apping (applying for roles via cold email, LinkedIn — I have included helpful resources in the next section) session where they formally introduced us to all things job-related: “resume”, “internships”, “domains”. For everyone, it was chaotic at first, but with time and help from seniors / batchmates, it got more manageable.

Anyways, once I had submitted my resume, I attended Career Cell’s session on ‘apping’. I was just fascinated by the process of apping to be entirely honest. In my mind, it was like unlimited shots at a lottery where the only cost of buying a ticket was 5 minutes of your time to send the mail. I had plenty of time in my third semester so I figured, “why not just app to some companies and universities?”. I didn’t have any goals or immediate desires to get an internship, rather I just wanted to test the waters.

Also, I felt like IBs (MI, E-Cell, TF) were not really a good fit for me, nor did I have any specific plans back home in December, so I would have the bandwidth in the winters. The opportunity cost seemed minimal and the upside was a cool experience and hence I decided to try apping! It was something I would come to love dearly 🙂

How I Started Applying for Internships

I have attached two resources by Career Cell that explain the process of ‘apping’ really well. I would suggest going through them to get a step-by-step understanding of how to go about applying for internships:
1. Core domain — Link to PDF [LDAP]
2. Non-core domain — Link to PDF [LDAP]

I pretty much followed the standard path mentioned in the PDFs. I just arbitrarily decided to app to Indian B-Schools (IIM, ISB), a few Indian Unicorns, and then some small financial firms. I drafted a cover letter, created a database of folks I want to reach out to, and then sent out emails for a few months.

The responses were quite low to be honest, but even just getting one or two responses was quite exciting and kept me going. I don’t think there’s any particular element of a profile that people are looking for at this stage. It’s more just a function of them needing an intern right now and you showing any kind of tangible work done (being at IITB is slightly helpful here I feel).

Finally, I got a positive response from a professor at ISB about a winter on-campus opportunity in a data analyst role. Getting official confirmation about dates, accommodation, etc. was a little difficult because they were not too responsive. Fortunately, I had clarity by November end. There was no particular pre-requisite, the stipend was 20,000 INR and there was no accommodation provided. Also, it was a cohort of 8 interns from various IITs. I was all set to go to Hyderabad on December 1st, where I would stay with my relatives.

The Actual Experience at ISB Hyderabad

I’ll briefly go over my month-long experience in two parts, work-related and non-work related.

Coming to the first part, long story short, it was just grunt work. The 8 of us were working under the Professor’s Research Assistants (RAs). The RAs were great people and extremely smart, it was lots of fun working with them. The project was around building a centralised portal for Indian voting data that anyone in the country can use. Although this voting data is already public, it is not usable. Ideally, each constituency enters the number of votes all contesting candidates get into a standardised excel sheet and upload it onto a national portal where the data can be easily accessed. In reality though, many constituencies print the table, handwrite the number of votes and upload pictures onto the state portal (not a nationally centralised one). This makes it impossible to perform any kind of analysis that would require voting data.

The problem was very interesting, but the work we had to do was laborious. We had to download these pictures / pdfs from state websites, rename and organise them into a common hierarchical folder. Then run them through an OCR that ISB had purchased and finally flag all the files that the OCR couldn’t fix. To be honest, I didn’t mind it because I just listened to music and there was no stress.

Moving onto the non-work related part, I had a lot of fun. I was in the ISB campus from 9AM to 5.30PM everyday. We worked maybe 5–6 hours everyday and then spent the rest of the time eating at the canteen (there was free chai / coffee) or roaming around the campus. The other interns were mainly 3rd year students from IIT Kharagpur and they were very nice. Post work hours and on weekends, I would spend time with my relatives and watch the FIFA World Cup 2022. The other folks took up a PG close to ISB and explored the city on the weekends. All in all, it was quite a relaxed and warm experience.

The Winter Intern Cohort!

My Two Cents

My advice would just be to look at all the options you have in the winter (Chilling at home, Inter IIT, IBs, Projects, etc.) before deciding you want to do an internship. If you do decide that an internship is what you want to do, be mindful of the fact that apping can be a boring process and the work given to a sophomore is usually menial. In my case, I didn’t mind either of these and felt that the overall experience was worth it.

IIT Bombay has no shortage of resources, blogs or seniors to help you out at every step of the way! I’d be happy to answer any specific questions (can WhatsApp me at 9886771001). Hope this blog helped!