In this article, Anurag Prateek, a student of DMS IIT Dhanbad who interned at Urban Company talks about his summer internship experience. Find out about how he prepared for the summer placements, his onboarding process, his experiences & what his learnings are during this internship.
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Hi, Tell us about how you got selected for this internship? Take us through the moment you realized you had got the internship.
Saw a post on LinkedIn regarding an opening for UC Delhi Team in Men's grooming Royale Segment. I sent my Resume to the designated email address and received a call from the respective Category Manager who took my telephonic interview and after that took a video interview as well. After discussing the Job Profile, growth opportunities, and background, he offered me the internship.
On joining the company as an intern, how has your onboarding experience been like?
It has been really smooth, and my CM has been really helpful with all the processes related to onboarding and is always ready to help me understand new aspects of the job and how UC works
How has your interaction with the team members and colleagues been like? How will you make sure to leave the best impression on your supervisors by the end of the internship?
The interaction has been pretty well. I and 3 more interns were part of the old team, and now we have been shifted to a new team, where we are promoted as Team Leads who have to manage a team of 5 new interns each and help them understand the UC working process. It has been a good experience so far and also has allowed me to develop my skills as a leader within the team. It feels good when your supervisor trusts you with more responsibility and motivates me to do better
Tell us in brief, about the project you are currently working on and how is this project going to help the company?
The current project I am working on is with Onboarding and overall operations of UC Partners in the Men's Grooming category. This involves a series of steps and processes, starting from cold calling to screening, background verification to batch processing, and other stuff. UC has a huge outreach in the Grooming category and this project can help it penetrate more deeply into this huge market area and help expand its domain into more cities
Are You The Best Summer Intern Of The Class Of 2022? Share Your Own Internship Experience.
Give us an overview of how you prepared for your summer placement season.
By being active on LinkedIn, making new connections in UC, and trying to add more skills to my CV
Based on your internship experience till now, what are some necessary skill sets one must be prepared with before starting an internship?
Few skills that every intern has to have are -
1. Communication skills as they are necessary to communicate with your seniors and colleague and by having proper communication one can always approach their seniors for new initiatives and also feel more confident.
2. Creativity - It is important to think out of the box and try to be more creative when we hit a roadblock. Many times we face issues during our internship and our supervisors expect us to think out of the box and help overcome these issues. It is always important to have an open mind and think of the bigger picture.
What are some new skills that you have developed while working in the company?
Leadership skills - as I have been made a Team Leader and have been leading a team of 5 people, this experience helped me develop my leadership skills and by being open to feedback, I was able to improvise myself every day
Time Management - Since UC is a start-up and they have huge targets and high expectations, I learnt time management skills by judiciously using my time and working on different processes.
What are some of the challenges that you have faced in your internship and how have you overcome them?
While working on cold calling, we as a team faced the problem of data crunch. we had exhausted our given new leads and were not able to get any more responses from existing leads. in such a case scenario, I suggested my team start utilizing their old data of people who were interested in UC but couldn't join, so as to save our time and also onboard new partners who have relevant experience
Tell us about a situation where you were complemented by your Manager for your work.
In my second week, we were a total of 10 people working and out of which only 2 (including me) had the experience working on UC's Database and system. so, we both had to work extra few hours daily to fix up issues being faced by other interns and feed data into the database. despite this, we both performed very well and also did our extra given responsibility perfectly. our manager was impressed with our work and after that day, we both have been main Team Leads and are also having the responsibility to communicate across categories if needed and look after the whole intern team
What have been your major learnings during the internship?
Sales calls, as I have come from an Automobile background and have always done an internship in the Operations domain; This was a pretty new experience for me and with time I started learning how to communicate with potential clients and improve my sales pitch to please them.
Leadership, as this was my first time being in charge of such a big team directly and help them with several issues. this helped me discover a new side of mine and connect with the interns in a more open way
Tell us about your final presentation of the project to your manager in brief. What was the toughest question asked during the presentation and how did you answer it?
Haven't taken place yet, it is a 3 months internship
Some advice that you would like to give to your juniors based on your internship experience.
Always have an open mind while heading into projects and try to look upon every problem as a challenge.
What was one of the best moments according to you during your internship?
Becoming a team leader, and helping my team get the best results for 2 consecutive weeks that earned the whole team praises from the manager and cluster lead
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TIMELINE, PROCESS AND RULES
- You don't need to register on InsideIIM.com or on the Kampus App to take part in Summer Saga Season 8. Simply share your experiences in the Digital Diary. To maintain standardisation, every Digital Diary will have a few questions that you'll need to answer.
- Access all the Digital Diaries forms from here: Digital Diary 1 | Digital Diary 2 | Digital Diary 3 | Digital Diary 4 | Digital Diary 5
- Your overall submission will be evaluated on the following parameters:
-Completeness: This depends on the number of Digital Diaries you have filled.
-Value Addition: This depends on how in-depth your answers have been. The score for this parameter will be given by our Judges.
-Reach: This depends on how many unique people have read your internship experience once we publish the article. We maintain fair play, we will publish all the articles on the same day, so that you can also share the same in your network.
- There is also a title called, ‘Campus With The Most Interesting Interns’ that will be awarded to (a) the campus that submits the maximum number of entries and (b) the campus that submits the best quality entries (based on the score given by our judges). The minimum entries from campus to be considered for this title is 10. So, if you want your campus to win the title then make sure your classmates and other students from your b school share their experiences in this year's Summer Saga Competition.
This competition is broadly divided into four categories. Refer to the table below to know more about prizes in each category.
Prize Money
|
Category
|
|
Banking and Finance
|
Sales, Marketing and General Management
|
Operations
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HR, Consulting and Others
|
| 1st Prize |
₹ 10,000 |
₹ 10,000 |
₹ 10,000 |
₹ 10,000 |
| Runner Up |
₹ 5,000 |
₹ 5,000 |
₹ 5,000 |
₹ 5,000 |
The 1st Prize winner will also get a one-hour 1-on-1 career guidance session with an industry stalwart, from our panel of mentors in Kounsel.
ABOUT THE JUDGES
Every year, we have Campus Managers from some of the top companies (such as Reliance, HSBC, Flipkart, ABG, HUL, TAS, etc) judging the annual Summer Saga competition. We will release the details of the judges of Summer Saga Season 8 soon!
Check out the previous year's
winners!
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Maybe this will help you reflect and recall these two months as well (which can come in handy when appearing for interviews in the future). InsideIIM is the perfect platform to chronicle your experiences, your highs, your lows and everything in between.
So guys, what are you waiting for? Start writing! You have a voice. You have the experience. Make the best of it!