My roller coaster ride aka MBA summer internship with Capgemini started on April 3rd, 2017 at their Pune office. The 3-day induction program was fun, exciting and gave us interns a brief overview about Capgemini, the different areas they worked upon and also a brief about the projects we will be doing. Throughout the induction program, we had interactions with different business department heads, CXOs and also the Group HR head. Their sessions were invaluable and those interactive sessions helped us in gaining insights into how we should go about our internship at Capgemini. After the induction program, I had to travel to Chennai for my project.
After landing in Chennai, from 10th April started a unique experience of my life. On the first day morning, I was debriefed by my project guide and mentor about the project deliverables from my side. The topic of my project was to measure the impact on an organisation structure when it moves from traditional IT model to Cloud-based model and the way cloud computing has changed the way of business in different Financial sectors. I, along with my fellow intern, (let’s name him Mr. N) were to come up with recommendations and suggestions on how an organisation should go about for the transformation process. Thus, started the research and ground work, the data collection from numerous publications, so that we could analyse and come up with the best possible solution. We had access to the Company knowledge portal, the digital library and were told by our Project Guide to come up to him anytime we face any difficulties.
We explored the huge amount of data we had collected over the first 7 days, skimmed through plenty of white paper publications, had talks with company employees and those much senior to us about the way cloud computing has changed the job that they do. The best thing about Capgemini is the culture and spirit everyone has at the workplace, we were never treated as a couple of summer interns, but everyone talked to us as if we were peers, and even the Vice President of our department was happy to indulge with us in a discussion about our Project when we needed help. We prepared our first draft of the preliminary findings and showed it to our Project Guide by the end of two weeks. We never expected him to take so much time out of his busy schedule for us to have a long discussion about the part where we did well and also the part where we had to fine tune and work more on the topics.
Since then, every evening we updated our Project Guide about the improvements on the research part and the corresponding deck we prepared. By the first week of May, we had almost completed the task that was assigned, so our guide set up a meeting with our Mentor to have a mid-review, feedback about the same. Although we were nervous, the feedback went pretty well and our Mentor who was from the USA was very straightforward in his assessment and sincere with his suggestions. We were relaxed after that review and went about making the changes suggested, had our final review with Guide and Mentor in the last week of May, they were impressed by our work. We even did some further research on the topic since we had time left. Some important lessons learned from the internship were:
1. From the very first day, sit down with your Project Guide or Mentor and have a clear understanding of the project deliverables, write it down and get it sanctioned.
2. Have constant feedback from the project guide, they are more than keen to help you with the task and unless you go and ask for help in the organisation, no one will know what work you are doing.
3. Everyone at Capgemini was helpful and was happy to oblige if you are ready to take the first step. The culture at the company is awesome, instead of waiting for weekends, here employees have TGIM, Thank God, it's Monday where song and dance celebrations are held every Monday from 1 pm to 2 pm.
During our after-work hours, we explored Chennai and during weekends, we visited the beaches and famous temples in and around the city. Lastly, I would like to thank Capgemini for giving me this opportunity and making me a better MBA professional than I was when I joined the organisation. The memories that I have from this internship is something unique that I will cherish for the rest of my life.