How to get an internship at TCS
Tata Consultancy Services is an IT service, consulting and business solution company. It is one of the most reputed IT service brands worldwide and has branches in forty six countries. Through Academic Interface Program, TCS provides internships to students from India as well as abroad.
How to apply?
For students outside India, there is Global Internship Program and for students from India, you need to register on their website and submit your resume along with contacting the TCS academic relationship managers through your college’s Training and Placement Cell. Mostly, they get back to you in some time if there is any vacancy available and if not, then you’ll have to follow up with your Training and Placement Cell.
Who can apply?
Students pursuing graduate, post-graduate, and Ph.D. degrees can apply. In few colleges, TCS has offered the top 2% of their campus-recruited candidates an internship offer. The company has also offered internships to the winners of a few coding-related competitions, like CodeVita, that they have organized in colleges.
What after applying?
After applying, the CVs are shortlisted primarily on the basis of marks in related field and projects undertaken against the available internship vacancies since they have a pre-defined number of internships. Once a candidate is shortlisted, he/she is required to give a round or two of technical and HR interviews through the telephone. The questions are varied on basis of your area of expertise or according to the projects you have been part of if any. The technical questions can be generic as well as specific (like questions about any programming language).
Few examples of those questions are-
– How can top sites (like Amazon or Flipkart) improve in their application?
– Why did you choose to do a project in this language?
– Describe the details of the project you did as a part of your curriculum.
– How can you improve the efficiency of algorithm using data structure?
The HR round questions are pretty standard, like-
– Where do you see yourself after this internship in 5 years?
– If we have other requirements, then will you work towards fulfilling them?
– What was the most difficult situation you have been and how did you overcome it?
For the candidates who secured internships through means other than registering at their website, TCS is known to conduct an aptitude test of an hour or so. It has both verbal reasoning and quantitative ability questions and is conducted in their office as a criterion for selection.
Word of Advice from ex-interns:-
Follow-up! – That’s the golden keyword to get into an organization which spans across 46 countries. TCS literally gets a lot of internship applications and it is very much possible that your resume might have been lost in the deep confines of the HR’s mail account. Just a friendly reminder would do a lot of good to you.
Take full advantage of the knowledge transfer session – The initial period where they train you to work on certain systems or department is very important and it should be taken seriously.
Mentors/guides are always there for you – They work towards making you as comfortable as professionally possible in the new work environment. Starting from technical guidance to the non-technical advice, they are always ready to lend a helping hand.
But do not expect them to spoon-feed you – Simply, they don’t entertain the silliest of doubts. Do your homework and go to work. At some point, they expect you to understand that you are responsible for what you do.
Do your research – There are many R&D labs of TCS which hire interns. It is advisable to do adequate research about those labs if you want to get into one of them as they do R&D in different areas/subjects.
For further details and information, check the TCS Academics Interface Programme page.
Is software industry your calling? Bhawna’s summer internship experience at TCS.
Want to Intern at similar Companies? Check out the latest computer science internships and engineering internships. To apply for more of such internships, please register here.
Editor’s note: The information is based on the interviews of certain ex-interns of the company. Readers are advised to go through the TCS website or contact the TCS office for latest information. We would like to thank Akhil Killawala, Bhavya B. and Vishal Bansal for their valuable inputs.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published on November 24 2014 and has been updated to make it more up-to-date.
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