It had been a long and tiring summer placement season, like every other 'Intellectual' in a B-school campus, I too had to watch with a heavy heart, my batch mates take away the shiny cheesecake placements, with all the bells and whistles, those very coveted internships were very glamorous yet unappealing to me, needless to say, this became a handicap for me, being over selective and picky in B-schools placements often lands one onto a point of no return, but, to my battered yet battling luck, this internship fell on my lap, as easy as it sounds, the falling on the lap happened much later. The process that Sattva used to pick me out of the shiny lot was very different from typical summer placement processes. A live case was floated to our batch, the case was extensive and had a lot of elements borrowed from a 'Management Consulting' classroom, but unlike a classroom case, it's requirements weren't defined, case entailed pieces of information about a skill development center in the doldrums, needing diagnosis and correction almost entirely, my proposed solution contained all the requisites curated by my thought, I stuck to good old Drucker-Fuyol style of management thought but mixed it up with my thought and organised the whole thing as I thought a case like that should be solved. I got through the case round and was summoned for an interview with the founders, The interview went on for a good one hour and I was selected to join the consulting service team as a summer intern.
I was On-boarded onto a two-year old consulting assignment that Sattva was working on for Michael & Susan Dell foundation, This project would become the universe of my thought for the next 8 weeks, occasional work did come up, my eagerness to work doesn't spare much time for anything else, so any bandwidth that remained, was taken by projects with other clients like HCL Foundation, Titan, CDD society. The project with Michael & Susan Dell Foundation was unlike any other consulting project i had heard of, The organisation was looking into the Education Technology space as a solution to improve youth skills & employement levels in India, my main job as an intern was project management or rather program management for project operations. Project management exposure for an MBA intern is as rare as a good Monsoon. But as the good old market Pundits say, when there's a good monsoon, there is good fortune.
In my 8 weeks at Sattva, I worked with plenty of people, funnily, HR at Sattva is called the 'People Team', this internship was Consulting, Research, Project management, implementation and more than anything People management, the number of people I interacted with as part of my work is uncanny. Sattva aims to create an impact by what it does, I was gratefully impacted by what it did for me.
My mentor at Sattva, Ojas is one of those prodigal techies that you see in the show 'Silicon valley', like many other bright engineering nuts out there, he too had a startup out of his dorm, life and eagerness to learn brought him to Sattva where he now is a consultant, he was the real star over there for me. A marketing major, I flourished in my internship doing project implementation and management, only because of him.
