One of the most awaited moments for a 1st year MBA student after their fresher's party is their
summer placements and the internship. This wait ended for me when I joined
Tata Steel in the summer of 2018 at Jamshedpur.
The internship program, "
Inspire 2018", truly lived up to its name. I was working with the
Procurement and Logistics department at Tata steel and I can say that it is one of the lifetime opportunity anyone could get to experience the gigantic scale on which the company operates. One could see tangible things happening in front of their eyes - how the steel is manufactured from iron ore in humongous steel and sintering plants (thermal plants) which indeed required immaculate production planning and timely arrival of raw material, processing of finished goods & transporting them all over the country.
Also, apart from the large trailers and trucks carrying raw material inside the plant, there were railway tracks laid and trains were being loaded with steel bars and sheets for transportation. Seeing Indian Railways inside Tata Steel plant was something beyond my imagination!
I was staying in the XLRI hostel for these 2 months and man! - The city and campus is a beauty. I made friends with a lot of locals over there, got to know about their culture , tried '
Litti choka' for the first time and explored the city to its fullest.
Although I got to learn many things at the internship in terms of the transportation industry, negotiating with the suppliers , data crunching and capacity planning, but the best was learning horse riding!
Yes, it is true! Tata Steel adventure foundation (TSAF) run this riding school and I was truly excited when I came to know about it. Horse riding has been always on my bucket list but I would have never imagined that I will learn it during my internship! So every day from 6:00 am - 7:00 am I used to go for the riding classes and report to office by 9:00 am.
Preparation before the Internship :
1. Microsoft Excel & Powerpoint - This is a must know skill for any internship. If not advanced level VBA programming, one should be comfortable with at least vlookup and pivot table function. In the initial phase of the internship, I had a tough time with these tools when loads of data was dumped on me for analysis.
2. Industry Knowledge & Recent Innovation: Get to know the latest news about the industry you are going to work in. This comes in handy when you meet the top management and have something new to share with them which will project you as a smart and informed individual. In my case, I had a chat about the use of blockchain technology in logistics which has a great potential in India.
3. Connect with the alumnus in the same industry or company: At IIFT, the Alumni Relations committee connected us with the seniors of our college working in the same company, which boosted our confidence and helped us get an idea about the work culture of the company. Also, that is how I came to know about the accommodation provided by XLRI to Tata Steel interns.
4.Dress Smartly: Many students tend to ignore this part but it plays an important role in a corporate world. So, spend some money on buying good clothes/formals/Shoes. Needless to mention, a well-dressed person has an air of confidence which is liked by all.
My Internship Project & Learnings :
My project was to give a recommendation on the price variation clause which is there in all the long-term transportation contracts as diesel price are changing daily and in turn affecting the profitability of transporters and the company. Due to this daily fluctuations, transporters were irregular in their services and the company has to bear the losses.
Now the first step of your internship should be to sit with your mentor and
gauge the exact deliverable which he/she is expecting from you. A lot of my friends got a bad feedback because they were not clear about their deliverable till the last week of their internship. So, no matter how busy your mentor is,
be shameless and get your mentor to give you some time.
So, I started by getting a basic idea about the logistics industry in India, different types of trailers used in Tata Steel, their mileage and load carrying capacity, the effect of crude oil and exchange rates on the diesel price in India etc. just to get my base set.
After that, I interacted with various vendors and tried to understand the problems they are facing, the practices followed by other organizations to which they are providing services to, what they are expecting from the company etc. In the process of these interactions, I got to know quite different things about the fuel hedging being done by various companies, linking the WPI index with the price fluctuations and many such processes which I wouldn't have thought about in the first place. So, moral of the story is to
interact with as many as entry-level stakeholders and keep yourself
open to all the "weird" ideas.
The last stage was secondary research where I found the transportation contracts of around 18 companies from different industries like electrical, dairy products, cables etc. which helped me in benchmarking the best practices being followed in these industries related to the transportation of the products or raw materials/ finished goods.
During these 2 months, I have applied so many concepts ranging from statistics to finance to economics to what not and ultimately I realized that learning won't stop after getting my MBA degree; it will START from there!
So the best thing about internship at Tata Steel ? It
made me a better person! I won't be able to express it in words but there is some kind of invisible
set of values that runs throughout the company, which has inspired me to be fair and honest in every decision I take in life.
Advice for Juniors:
Make your presentation as precise and to the point as possible. Instead of giving an overview about the industry /organization in which your reviewer might have been working for a decade, give them that blow of
fresh ideas or insights which you have found out during your project.
Get them to ask you questions instead of wasting time in showing them those mundane slides.