Summer is here! With it comes the anxiety of sweating it out for the next 60 days in the internship. It is that time of the year, when first-year MBA students step out and try to kick with their legs and push with their hands before they learn to swim in the corporate ocean. But there is more to this season than just learning the know-how of the industry. At the end of the internship is the coveted Pre-Placement Offer/ Interview (for most of those running the race).
For all institutes, the number of internship offers that convert into a PPO/PPI is important. It affects their brand in the b-school education industry and in the eyes of recruiters. Students aspiring for MBA’s and on the lookout for the best institutes should have this as a criterion before choosing their institute of preference. This is because the most important thing for a student is to get a good placement at the end of their investment of two years, and today most companies are shifting towards an internship based recruitment process. There are many companies out there which have decided that they would not take the pain of going down to institutes to recruit again when they had already invested so much in students during internships.
However, the internship process does not itself guarantee a PPO/ PPI offer. Therefore, the stakeholders (institutes, faculties, seniors, alums, etc.) involved in the process dedicate their resources towards the students from their respective institutes. Ask for any help anywhere, and people are ready to help you.
The process is competitive and sixty days is not a lot of time. The kind of problems that companies expect interns to solve are mostly complex and may involve doing a little homework before entering the arena. But this may not be the case with everyone. An intern is expected to give practical solutions to the real-time problems that companies are facing, and if they like your work, they may even get implemented across the organization/ part of the organization. Every institute must be putting in resources to polish their students in every way. Students are taking help of professors, going through research papers, pouring over books in the library or maybe just googling over things that might be helpful.
The first round of competition among b-school students happens when they fight out to get into the best companies during the summer placement season. The level of competition among them is so high that nobody wants to face it again during the final placement season. Therefore, the PPO becomes a priority at the end of the internship and the not so lucky ones live to fight another day.
But for some of us, the internship is about an experience. It is about getting to know more about management. It is about going to a new city and meeting industry experts and a lot of other new people. People already have plans of taking weekends off to some nearby getaways to chill out or maybe even watch an IPL game live.
Even I am going through a lot of what I mentioned above. The pressure of performing is high, let’s see how it turns out.