Making of Internfair 2012!
Today I
nternfair goes live! And this marks the culmination of a little over a month’s efforts of 30+ team members spread across length and breadth of the country and one odd fighter across 7 seas in UK.
How the idea of Internfair was conceived is an interesting story. Originally Internfair was not meant to be, instead we planned to conduct a photo upload competition which was easy enough for everyone to participate and at the same time could be made go viral through facebook! Given Saarang 2011’s amazing success in getting its facebook likes from 6K to 30K+ in a month’s time, this formula looked a sure and easy shot to success and we had almost planned the whole event!
And then one of the mentors at Internshala raised the pointed question – what did the photo upload event have to do with meaningful internships that Internshala wants to be known for? And we realized that in the excitement to reach out to masses quickly, we were forgetting the message we wanted to reach out to them with!
We felt that if we wanted to reinforce the message of meaningful internships, there could not be a better event than one where we students can show their true potential irrespective of academic background and win well deserved internships and thus evolved the present format.
I do not think there exists a precedent of a similar event, at least not in India, and definitely not of a scale that we have aimed for. In this statement alone, lies the triumph for Internfair!
Internshala was less than a year old start up without any formal team in place and not many companies knew about us; the team (all of them students themselves) had little experience of doing things that we needed to do in order to make it happen, and we were spread across geographies making coordination a challenge. And to top it, we had to do all of it in a month’s time (most of the big student festivals in India have a planning and execution cycle of 4-6 months and a team of 300+ volunteers and coordinators). Surely there were rejections from corporates, frustrations over the student publicity efforts, the Web Ops piece looked tentative at best and the event formats kept changing. But through all these pains and heartaches, we tugged along and managed to put together the show as planned and (almost)on time!
We know its a small step towards the culture of meaningful internships in India but a huge leap for the entire team’s confidence internally. I dedicate this edition of Internfair to everyone who truly believes in power of dreams.
Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys; we present Internfair 2012 – may the best win!
Please log on to www.internshala.com/internfair for more details and participation.
