The first major milestone in your B-School journey is the Summer Internship process. Each person is different and so are their expectations. For me, my dream company had to be a market leader, a company that is highly innovative, dynamic, and one that could provide tons of growth opportunities. Hence, obviously, when I was selected for an internship opportunity for the Supply Chain domain at Asian Paints, which has been a market leader for more than 50 years and is known for its innovation, my happiness knew no bounds.
I vividly remember my experience with the organization during the summer internship process at SJMSOM, IIT Bombay as their process was one of the most thought-provoking and well-organized processes on the campus. The first round after the CV shortlisting for Asian Paints was a Group Discussion (GD). I believe the best way to prepare for and crack the GD is to understand and speak the language of the business leaders in the organization through interactions with them during the Pre-Placement Talks and Industry Interaction series. Asian Paints had given us an abstract topic for our GD. However, I made sure to back my points with relevant examples from different industries and deliver my points in crisp and clear sentences. It was evident that the panel focused on quality of input rather than quantity and thus people who spoke relevant points were selected for the next round. This was followed by a Personal Interview. I had practiced & prepared for the interview quite well through honest introspection to identify the key areas I needed to focus on. I had also learned the art of storytelling, which probably helped me here. I was pretty thorough about the contents of my resume, and I made it a point to back my answers with relevant examples and data pointers. The panellists from Asian Paints asked me a lot of value-based situational questions, and I was asked to explain each of my answers in depth. I think they were looking for people who could work well in cross-functional teams and had an eye for detail. I also believe that culture fit with the organization was also on top priority.
Reflecting upon my beautiful internship journey, I can safely say that “Every point of the journey exceeded my expectations”. The onboarding process and related interactions started a couple of weeks before the official start date of the internship with some interesting ice breaker activities on WhatsApp. Some interesting video snippets of ‘Leaders Speak’ and a few innovative marketing campaigns were also shared on the groups created. It was on the first day of the induction that I realized that the quality of the talent within the company is top-notch. The two-day induction process gave us an opportunity to interact with the senior leaders of Asian Paints - their journey in Asian Paints inspired us to go above and beyond in our professional career and motivated us further for our summer internship. The project that was assigned to me was a real-life problem that the business wanted to solve. In fact, we were told during the Pre-Placements talks and during the induction that a lot of areas that the company ventured into were actually projects given to interns! The scale, depth and impact of the project motivated me further.
There is a saying that "Well begun is half done," hence for the first week, my project guide, buddy and I worked towards finalizing the project deliverables. I loved the fact that I was involved in charting out the plan rather than it being assigned to me. It helped develop a sense of accountability and responsibility in me. Another striking aspect of my internship was that I was never treated as an intern who joined the company a few weeks back, in any of my interactions. Everyone from my peers to the senior leaders were very welcoming of the new ideas and was very keen to understand my perspective. The focus has always been on taking risks to be more efficient in processes or ways or working and on understanding how to improve on the learnings from a mistake/ failure by understanding the reasons for its occurrence rather than on the fact that it was committed. The nature of my project required me to interact with many stakeholders, which helped me broaden my perspective of solving a business problem. The learnings I gained in these two months were unparalleled to any other phase of my life. “Perfectly balanced as all things should be!" apart from work, our internship was also filled with numerous fun activities and speaker sessions from experts in Asian Paints – AP Paathshala. Finally, the news of a PPO from Asian Paints was my dream come true!
The only “secret mantra” for a successful summer internship experience is hard work and leveraging the wonderful B-School ecosystem to learn as much as possible and I cannot wait to experience my stint at Asian Paints as an employee!