"Starting a new job can be nerve-racking, but it's also exciting. You're embarking on a new future, positioning yourself to write a fresh story on a clean slate." – Adena Friedman
You are a fresher. You have never lived the corporate life before, and then one day, you come to know that you’ll be interning (let’s say first work experience: feels good) with Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) - the leading MSME sector bank, and the next thing you come to know is that your mentor is the Deputy General Manager of Credit and IT at that reputed bank and you’ll be working with all the erudite professionals on a topic that has no relation to you or your CV. Exciting? Horrifying? Mixed? Confident? Well mine was a mixture of all these feelings.
So let’s start from the beginning.
15th April 2019 was the day when I was introduced to the corporate culture. I was a bit nervous but confident enough to enter the building. I was directed to my mentor. He introduced himself and asked me about my life in general and interests. Then we decided upon the project and it was told to me on the same day that it would be applied across all the branches of SIDBI pan-India, upon completion.
My mentor felt that, being from a pure science background, I would’t be able to handle a credit and IT project and to be very honest, it was a challenge for me! But then I like taking challenges and completing it with utmost sincerity, hard work and dedication. So I started with the project that was related to automating SIDBI’s online loan applications and Loan Documentation with their Appraisal tool.
The work required utmost focus, diligence, patience (of course staring and working with laptop for hours and hours). But then that is what is meant to be. An internship is basically important so that you can get used to those working hours, deadlines, competitions and you can overcome your fears, your moments of breakdown etc.; it is meant so that you can come out of your comfort zone. It was not at all easy for me to work so accurately on a laptop and read all those lengthy documents and work on those for hours and hours. I expected my internship to be all fun (and it was) but with fun came responsibilities, challenges, learnings.
As the days passed by, the work grew and I had to put in extra efforts and hard work. I had to be more careful while working but I was loving it and living it thoroughly. Whenever I stumbled, my mentor was always there to guide me and help me out. The work, at times, required a lot of efforts and became un-manageable but again my mentor came to my rescue and all these things came as learnings to me. I learnt how to manage stress, how to manage deadlines, how to manage breakdowns, how to manage work load, and a lot more.
As my internship comes to an end today, I can proudly say that I’ve learnt a lot - I’ve learnt how credit appraisal of SIDBI works, how their online application works, how documents are generated and how they work and of course how excel plays a major role in your work life. I learnt how to utilize my time effectively, how to manage work, how to work efficiently and get my work done with utmost precision. I learnt values at SIDBI, how relations are maintained how people live like a family, I met some amazing people during my internship who made this two months ride a superb one. Perseverance is the key to everything. You need to be patient if you want to learn and grow.
And now for the best part - my mentor, who thought I won’t be able to do this project, says he is proud of me. I thoroughly enjoyed my internship and learnt a lot and emerged as a better person. I hope this knowledge helps me in my career and I hope I am able to work even better in any organization that I join because it is rightly said,
"Employees are the biggest assets of an organization".