You will come across various sorts of internships at b-schools. Some are dull, some are often intellectually stimulating, some are boring and then few internships are way beyond ordinary- they are fascinatingly challenging.
Dhruvi Trivedi, a PGDM student of St. Kabir Institute of Professional Studies (SKIPS) had an interesting one! She got the opportunity to intern as a Human Resources Assistant with Columbia Asia, an international private healthcare company with an extensive network of hospitals across Asia.
Learning HR skills in a hospital has to be a trial by fire, but for Dhruvi, her summer internship experience was an incisive one. “Hospitals can be tough, very intense and hard places to work in. However, interesting employee engagement can help the staff feel driven and bounce back at work,” elaborates Dhruvi. She recently returned to her classroom with an insightful work on “Employee Engagement,” an in-depth research that heavily draws from her stint at Columbia Asia.
How do you successfully complete an HR internship in a hospital set-up?
Dhruvi remembers her first day of the internship. The day was spent amidst whirl-wind of processes and fragmented information. However, her mentor made her feel at ease and acquainted her with different departments of the hospital, right at the outstart. Since then she went on to handle various responsibilities like recruitment, onboarding, documentation and more for the organisation. However, what must an intern be ready to brace when working in a tight structure as a hospital?
There will be new challenges every day, that as an intern you need to face and address.
At times you won’t really have help coming through but you need to use your management theories to solve the problems at hand.
Your ego won’t take you anywhere when you are meaning to join the world of HR. Put it aside.
Hospitals being mostly dull places, to have people feel motivated enough as an HR, you have to be ready to listen to their bickering and frustration and keep calm.
Focus on communication and communicate well. You will have to correspond with super-seniors like CEOs, MDs, COOs and senior physicians when working within a hospital set-up. You have to know how to convey your message well even if you do not have a senior backing you there.
Being an intern, of course, you are fresh in the system. Be ready to face rejections on and off but do not compromise on your final project. Keep asking questions and you will get the answers eventually when your seniors see your commitment.
“There was a day when I had to handle the whole department single-handedly. By the time I wrapped my work, I felt an incredible sense of satisfaction,” adds Dhruvi with a broad smile on her face.
A look into Dhruvi’s Project
Dhruvi’s internship gave her practical exposure to different areas of HR and offered her valuable insights. She used her understanding of recruitment, on-boarding, documentation and all that she experienced at Columbia Asia to make a compelling project around the necessity of “Employee Engagement” in hospitals. Her work points out how centralisation doesn’t always help and decentralisation is often crucial to maintain company’s credibility and keep employees happy. When asked about any particular message she might want to share with her juniors, Dhruvi drew from her own experience and remarks - “You have to separate your ego from work or it can become difficult to maintain healthy professional relationships. No work is small when the learning is big!”