My Internship Story

(Winner of the #MyInternTheory Activity at BlogAdda)

I have often found myself leaning towards lionization. Lionizing events, people, life in general. I think it’s a stupid thing to do. Not all events are grand nor all parties marvelous or all times dripping with uncountable moments honeyed with joy and celebration. Days are mostly just days, untinted by sepia-toned happiness. That's why I have decided to caption this post simply. My internship story was just such a story. Simple. Unadorned. Full of those large terms of corporate life you come to hear often. Work, productivity, deliverables...

There is always a haggle for internships especially in the second year of engineering. Everyone takes up some project, digs up some contacts, makes his/her way into some famously named corporation and so on. There is a lot of fondness for big names and bigger titles. Besides, internships are time for gyaan by seniors, frantic hunts for good projects and sweating it out at the height of summer or shivering your way to work in the depths of winter, for a taste of that which you call ‘work experience’. Sweet term, isn’t it?

www.workinggirlinc.com

But some people of my ilk preferred the sweetness of slumber to the tedium of toil and so, two summers of my B.Tech. flashed past in blissful holiday-making and vacation. But when the third year loomed large, I began to sweat. An internship had to be had this time.

As good fortune would have it (as it usually has in stories and anecdotes), one of our alumni came to the campus to get some fresh talent from our batch. They crafted a test and handed it out to all of us. As it happened, much to my surprise, out of the six students selected for internship from our batch, I was one. The only girl, to be sure. I did draw some stares that time. My peers wondered if my flukes had hit home somehow. But thankfully, for the time being, I had clinched an internship!

And therein began my two-month long chapter. We were to work at a start-up which makes Android applications keeping in mind the needs of the rural sections of the society in addition to the innovations in the industry and the like. I had till then worked only on a couple of languages like C, C++, Java. I am not much of a techie and Android was new to me. I didn’t even have an Android phone at the time. But Android I did learn. On the job as they say. We used to start working at 10 in the morning and till about 6, we hacked at codes and ran tests. I was given an app all to myself. To be honest, I was more interested in designing the user interface and the logo and even coming up with dumb one-liners to append to the app title than coding the actual thing.

Although anyone who knows me would tell you that I am no great a fan of coding, I am well-acquainted with the madness that takes hold of you when a semicolon is amiss, when everything reduces to the flashing screen before you, when your fingers talk code, when an unsuccessful execution causes your heart to sink, when a particularly stubborn code snippet causes you utter frustration, when you press F9 and experience wild joy on seeing it all execute. Those two months sealed these feelings deeper within me.

By the time we were done with our internships and had our letters in hand, I had discovered a latent love for technology somewhere in me. I have no idea whether the app I made was ever released in the market, but since then, every time I glanced at its interface, I thought it looked beautiful, much like a poem.  

And if apps can be poems, can’t internships be stories as well?

    

I’m sharing my first internship experience for the #MyInternTheory activity at BlogAdda in association with Intern Theory.