“Life is about accepting the challenges along the way, choosing to keep moving forward, and savouring the journey.” -
And one such challenge was to be the first batch of virtual summer interns. The summer internship is one of the most defining moments of an MBA student in terms of the application of their instilled skills and skills to learn & adapt to new working environments in a span as short as 8 weeks. Thanks to the ongoing crisis in making the internship more challenging, especially for people who are working for the first time in a corporate environment. I belong to the aforementioned category and can surely confirm that the current situation made the internship exciting and enriching.
Getting an opportunity to intern with the largest mutual fund house in the country, set my expectations very high in the terms of experience and expertise that I would be provided with to learn while working with a company. Due to the virtual mode of internship, I was worried that it might hamper the communication among interns, which was truly taken care of. Interning in a financial services firm during the times when the market was highly uncertain due to the pandemic, it was sure to be a roller coaster ride as there would be certain changes in the manner the company handles its customers and their portfolio. Before I joined the internship I was very excited and a little bit more nervous as to how they might expect me to perform, will I be a good fit or not etc., so I tried to understand how a mutual fund company operates by going through various articles and few books which inculcate backdrop of global as well as Indian mutual fund industry as a whole and it helped me at different levels.
My internship was focused on the equity mutual funds division. Before starting the work, we were provided with the prerequisite material to understand the deliverables of the project. The work revolved around doing promoter level analysis of several companies whilst overlooking their related party transactions and vested interest of key managerial personnel (KMPs) in other business ventures. The key piece of learning that I take away from these 8 weeks is, the difference between learning by reading and studying and learning through hands-on experience of applying the same is as similar to criticizing a player while commentating and playing on the field (read cricket here). My understanding of how any mutual fund house works and how a portfolio is designed was a lot different from what I experienced while interning, the importance to minute details and heavy research work that goes before taking any equity stock in the consideration for its inclusion in any portfolio; forms an imperative part of the process, which to my understanding before joining the internship was of little importance. This internship would not have been possibly completed without the guidance of my mentor at each step who made me realize that “learning by doing” is a better teacher than any individual can have and a little praise & motivation goes hand in hand with the incremental dedication towards delivering better performance than before.