My internship at HP Inc. has been a perfect blend of learning and delivering. The experience in my eyes couldn’t have been better. Lovely mentors, great HR's, and an open environment full of positive people. Some striking features of my experience at HP includes a unique selection process (build a presentation on BREXIT overnight with random people whose names were mailed- present it- conversation oriented interview), joining the company and getting beautiful gifts, Eating Pizzas with the MD and talking about the company, its open environment and productive ecosystem, presenting the country heads my work and... yes, it is true... no boundaries of office timings! My project was to assist in deriving a business model of a program that my mentors were working on and its marketing strategy and the only evaluation criteria for me was performance. Since it was a live project my learning from it has been immense which can be funnelled down into the following 6 points:

Be To The Point And Precise

Well, my art of oratory and vocabulary skills can be a threat to your time and in this era people are rushing and have no time for anything extra. My mentors were country heads and time is the only thing that is scarce in their lives. We must be direct and make it easy for the other person to grasp and understand. If that is of value to them they will anyway extend the conversation. On similar grounds will be my post. Precise.

Patience

They are the leaders in PC market since years and have offered great roles with a good stipend and came very late for the process at IMT. Furthermore, when I had joined my mentors were travelling so I had nothing at all to do in initial days. Patience was the key. I made friends around me which helped me later. Be Patient. It Helps.

Start The Conversation

It is very important to build a good conversation with people around. It is through them that we learn the most because they all have tremendous experience in their domains. Conversation shall be started with either asking for help and giving help. It makes it appear more genuine and helps in the longer run.

I thought of helping a person next to me when I was free. He gave me the details and in the due course has taught me several things. That person eventually became my other mentor since he was the product manager (Asia Pacific Japan Team) of the project I am working on. (His project was so interesting that I asked my mentor to work on it. Guess what? I got it!)

Sincerity

It is this key element by which everyone in company judges you. People around me valued willingness to learn. I was quite pathetic in the quality of work initially and my mentor has always told me how can I improve it. I improved it, showed it, got it wrong, improved it, showed and the cycle was endless. But, it helped me to learn in the best possible way.

Ownership

Taking responsibility for entire project and working on different work streams (finance, partnership, research, marketing campaigns, pricing, STP, value proposition, geographical expansion, Business model, channel management…etc.). My mentors have not only guided me on strategising all of it but also helped in on smaller aspects like using pivot table on Excel for data analysis. This I believe gave me an all-around view of how the projects in a company work. They have involved me in their global meetings, country heads meetings, partners meet (with Microsoft country head) so that I get diverse perspectives from different work streams.

Now, with all the emotions in the baggage, the epilogue cannot be complete without a heartiest “Thanks” to the organisation and its people.

GRACIAS

~Heeransh

Heeransh Rohatgi

My Experiments With HP Inc. - Heeransh's Internship Experience - IMT Ghaziabad