Shadab Alam is Marketing Manager at Internshala. When he’s not letting the world know about the epicness that is Internshala, he is laughing so hard he annoys the neighbours and almost makes his friends homeless. Shadab carries this joviality everywhere except when it comes to his salary — he makes the decision about how to spend his first salary with utmost seriousness. Read on!
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Nitisha Pandey has been with Internshala for about 10 months. She recently left her super-amazing internship with Internshala for a job at TCS. But we still love her, and admire her for her strength, resilience and general awesomeness. She has been behind the success of many of Internshala’s endeavours, and here she writes about her time at Internshala:
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PS – I had written the post below before the sad news of passing away of Delhi rape victim came in and as a resident of Delhi-NCR myself I feel both ashamed and scared and its difficult to be in a celebration mood. To the victim and her family – We are sorry! As a mark of respect, the celebration image associated with the post has now been removed.
Today, Internshala turns 2. For those interested in trivia, 2 years ago on 29th December 2010, we registered the domain www.internshala.com and the landing page went up. This is how it looked on the day of launch.
Since then, it has been a dream run. One just has to read the student and employer testimonials sprinkled around the website to get a sense of impact Internshala has made and the lives we have touched.
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I recently graduated from NIT Jamshedpur with two job offers in hand. Job offer- this reminds me of brutal GPL sessions (come on, we all know what GPL stands for, and if you’re really naïve, I’m sorry I am not going to strip it for you). You see the most interesting part is I ditched one of the offers, and the second offer- they just showed me the mirror. God! It was really a harsh experience for me to get ditched. But what the heck, I am smart enough to get a job. Read more…
Sarvesh is the founder and CEO of Internshala and abuses his authority regularly to dish out start up gyaan to unassuming innocent public and team members through this column. Read at your own risk, or leisure!
Couple of days back, I got my first salary from Internshala. My first salary 12 months after I left my job at Aviva and started working on Internshala full time.
It is a special moment; not just for me but also for my family, friends, and team members who have been there with me and for me right from the beginning. As a founder, it feels like a great validation of the idea.
These 12 ‘salary less’ months have been wonderful and when I look back, there are 3 key lessons that are worth sharing -
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The Internshala Facebook page happens to be the largest Facebook page about internships in India. We have always believed in the power of social media and wanted to share a story about how a scientific approach to social media helped us learn valuable lessons and avoid vague predictions. For the longest time, we shared one post a day on the page. While discussing our Facebook strategy some time ago, we wondered if it would help to increase interaction if we had two posts a day instead of our customary one post every evening. While it seems obvious that more posts equal more interaction, we did debate whether the afternoon post would be ‘wasted’ since not a huge part of our target audience is online on weekday afternoons. This is why we decided to conduct a test spanning around two weeks to assess whether two posts a day were substantially more effective than one.
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Jai (also known as Jaai, pronounced Zzaai) narrates her experience of managing Your Internship Story contest. How time flies, she started on sort of a ‘trial’ internship for a month (we thought she, having just written her 12th board exams, was too young for the role) and couple of months later, she was managing a national writing contest, India’s biggest perhaps, all by herself with help from rest of the team members. Read on to understand making of Your Internship Story and the lessons she learned from it!
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One of the great joys of starting Internshala has been the unlimited opportunities to explore erstwhile mysterious world of digital marketing. Not that I am an expert, but I wanted to write down the beginner’s lessons that I have learned in last 18 months for the benefit of the readers, many of whom are future entrepreneurs themselves.
In this 3 parts series, I’d document my experience of using Emails, Facebook, and Website Banners for marketing, starting off with Emails (or eDMs as many call them).
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Sowmya, another prized recruit from IIT Madras in Internshala team (thanks to Jithin’s awesome PR skills), led Publicity efforts for Internfair and managed interactions with 400+ campuses all over India. After Internfair, she joined Internshala again to manage Employer relations for a short period of time and is now permanent member of Internshala Goodwill Ambassadors team :)
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Jithin S Varghese a.k.a Fwani is an IIT Madras student who was inducted into Internshala circle after he pointed out how our one of facebook contests which relied on number of ‘likes’ to declare winner was a clear violation of facebook policies and could get our page banned! A true go getter, fight putter, winner material yet emotional, a BioTech student by degree and an HR professional at heart; Jithin recounts his experience of leading Internfair team back in Dec’11-Jan’12.
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Sonal (we do not really know if her last name is Jain or Sethiya) has the unique distinction of being Internshala’s first ever intern hired back in September 2011 and she has seen Internshala grown through the phases and been an integral part of each chapter of this story! When she is not busy working on Social Media, Editorial, or Publicity, she takes pleasure in hacking Suthirth’s facebook account, trolling Jai, or being trolled by Sidharth!
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Suthirth Vaidya a.k.a Sutts joined Internshala in December 2011 to work with our biggest online project Internfair back then and is the key architect behind Internshala’s Social Media strategy. One of the 2 first interns to ever work in Internshala ‘office’ , he narrates the tale of the summer gone by where he along with his twin brother Sidharth pulled InternSaturday off!
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Sidharth Ganesh a.k.a Sid, a now 3rd year Mechanical Engineering student at IIT Madras and the overall coordinator for InternSaturday, shares his experience of spending this summer with Internshala. Read on…
What does it take to be an entrepreneur?
There’s an easy way to find out, do an internship with a start up. But there’s a better way (certainly not easier), spend two months at a dedicated and passion driven entrepreneur’s home and work for the start up. Needless to say, I did the latter.
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Slumped into a high chair inside the dim lit eatery, surrounded by the team of interns, teeth lustfully digging into the scrumptious 18” slice of crispy cheese filled pizza; my mind wandered back to the conversation I was having with Kunal (Internshala advisor) back in February.
“InternSaturday is a great idea but I think you should wait until next year before you give it a try. Without a full time team, it will be very difficult to execute it.”
Reasoned Kunal when I first told him about the concept.
Completely drained and exhausted after Internfair (multiple times we had to rescue the event from the brink of ‘no show’), I had to concede that Kunal had a point and to attempt the daredevilry again could prove suicidal for Internshala. And unlike Internfair, InternSaturday was going to be an on ground event and we were absolutely unprepared for the level of complexities associated with it and hence, we decided to let it go for now.
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Nitisha, a 4th year computer science student at KEC Bhubaneswar, recently completed her 1st month at Internshala as Editorial intern. In this article she talks about her journey so far and how she is learning to push boundaries of word possible every day. Read on…
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But remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
Recently Suthirth, Intern – Social Media & Marketing, got a chance to live the quote and set the example for rest of the team to follow. It’s remarkable that we got something, which would have cost a bomb outside, done practically for free. But what is more remarkable is the grit, determination, and never say die attitude he displayed during two weeks of video making and delivered it on time. Rest of the story in his own words…
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Jaai is Internshala’s youngest intern and certainly the most vivacious one. Apart from being awesome at everything she does, her favourite passtime is to learn as much as she can at any given time. Open to challenges, super fast at getting acquainted and smarter-than-most-people-of-her-age Jaai writes about the first day of her internship at Internshala.
It is a generally accepted fact that exams suck and vacations rock. But after all the fun and purely time-wasting activities (staring at the computer, the TV and sometimes just at the ceiling) are over, you get sick of it. Someone utters the word ‘vacations’ and you make this face: Read more…
Internshala has a team of kick-ass, best in class, can give professionals a run for their money sort of interns handling various aspects of the business. Almost all of these, smarter than me, kids work with Internshala for the love of it, because there is only so much rich one can get by interning at a bootstrapped start up.
So when I asked them what did/will they do with their first stipend at Internshala (for most it was their first EVER income), I was expecting some eyebrows raised & some nasty comments thrown-in on the lines of “Yeah, that change. It came really handy to put in the slot of public telephone when I was making all those business calls!”
To my pleasant surprise however, we got a variety of responses. Some funny and some moving. I did promise the best answer to get a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates and I can’t seem to decide. If you’d like to help, why don’t you tell us which one did you like the most in the comments section below the post and let the best win! :)
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Pallavi Chakravorty a.k.a Pixie is enthusiasm personified. There is a whole new arm of Dietary Science dedicated to study what she has for breakfast that keeps this Energy Ball rolling :). May be she herself, a 2nd year Biotech student at IIT Madras that she is, would find that out one day.
Pallavi joined Internshala for a short stint to take care of Student Publicity for Internfair 2012 and the sheer commitment and drive with which she (along with Sowmya) handled such a huge responsibility makes you wonder if she was really doing it for the first time! Easily one of the most reliable and go-getter member of Internshala team, we wish to see her return VERY soon to do even more amazing things! Her experience at Internshala in her own words…
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Bastab Chakraborty a.k.a Bassy is one of the first 2 interns hired at Internshala for Editorial responsibilities. A software engineer, a blogger, a book reviewer and an Android lover – Bassy is a multi-talented personality (rumors have it that he turns into Batman at night). Among his other achievements at Internshala, the significant one is that he did not let a new nick name, Chakby, given to him by fellow intern Sonal, stick. Those who know Sonal would agree that it’s an achievement indeed!
Bassy is now moving on from Internshala to join the dark side (i.e. Corporate World) and while we deep down wish that things go horribly wrong for him there so that he has to come back to Internshala but we’d pretend to be happy for him and wish him all the luck in the world :) The note below is his experience of working at Internshala in his own words.
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