Best HR Intern At Merck MSD - Jojo Acharya From NMIMS Mumbai Shares His Internship Experience

MBA as a course is designed keeping in mind that practical application of theory is of utmost importance, and what better place to implement learning than the first stint in the corporate world - The summer internship at Merck MSD, a Pharmaceutical giant! My internship journey provided me just that, an opportunity to work and implement a project in a field of my choice - “Numbers and Analysis”. An internship works as a canvas which gives you a foray into the career you are about to bask your journey in, it allows you to take a taste of what the future might look like and with the experience I have had, I’m convinced this is my calling.

With a background in software, I was able to leverage the concepts I learnt and utilise them to better my interactions with different Business Intelligence tools like Spotfire and Tableau. With a plethora of data at my disposal, churning this data, and deriving meaning out of it wasn’t going to be easy, and posed as my biggest challenge. My thirst to excel, ensured that I wasn’t bogged down by this challenge and continued my quest to make sense of the data. The project was titled “HR KPIs and multidimensional Dashboard”. I utilised virtual models with appropriate filtering mechanisms to enable delving into issues that can crop up with respect to attrition and also created dashboards catering to headcount with multiple filtering structure, demographics and also specific dashboards identifying Women Leaders with Band 500 and above. During the course of my internship, I also presented a snapshot of the company and department wise performance in terms of man-management by showcasing attrition, annualised attrition based on department, Personal Sub Area etc.

My biggest fear, going into this internship was not being given meaty work. But, all my concerns were washed away right from the start. The work I was given motivated me and propelled me to thrive in the company. It truly was a wonderful experience working with Merck and I also got a chance to work with different verticals namely the HR operations team and the IT team. Merck employees provided a lot of support throughout the stint, which proved to be monumental in shaping my project. Due to all the help, and my tireless efforts, my project was also selected for the best intern competition among the top 10 entries. The experience has helped me explore the world of analytics and also enabled me to win further analytics case study competitions and bag a job in the same arena (analytics) with CBC. I wish to take all the rich experiences I have garnered at NMIMS, Mumbai and Merck and further explore what lies ahead.

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About the Author:

Jojo Acharya is a 2nd Year HR student at NMIMS Mumbai. He will be joining Cognizant Business Consulting post MBA in an HR Analytics role.