Your Internship Story — Behind the Scenes!
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!
I spent twenty minutes staring at the keyboard, trying not to make this article sound lame. Sadly, as super-unique as my experience with Your Internship Story contest was (I think), all you are going to read below are conventional things: how the whole team worked hard for the contest and how much I learned. I’ll try to make it entertaining, I promise.
So, it was seemingly simple: how difficult to execute can an online contest be, anyway? Turns out, as difficult as avoiding “Share this if you care” posts on Facebook. There were so many things to do even pre-launch: finalizing the concept, structure, prizes, publicity, making a detailed timeline, and most importantly, following this timeline. I have made amazingly detailed timelines for exams before, just that I’ve never followed them. New skill!
I did have the example of last year’s Your Internship Story contest, and I still do not know how we managed to make it a success with virtually no team. What you saw as this year’s YIS was the result of the entire team working hard to make everything happen. You don’t realize how many things there are to be done until you actually get down to doing them: designing a logo, the video, Facebook contests, posters and sponsorship among other things.
I’ll be honest, I temporarily fell out of love with it once or twice. One day we got 113 entries – how do you pick the best story out of 113? Also, since I think I’m really smart now because I’ve read so many internship stories, here’s a tip I hope everyone gets to read: good grammar is very important. Your story might be OMG-inducing but when someone has been reading articles all day, they tend to pick out the one that requires least editing over the one that begins like this – “So v went 2 da office this one day, n v ver so surprized…”. My memory is hazy but I have a feeling that the dent on my computer screen might have something to do with such a story.
But most of all, it was gratifying to see the amount of effort students had put in for their articles and heartbreaking because we had to reject some entries just because others were better. After a point, originality and uniqueness became our prime focus. We had read more articles than we could count about new countries, but the way Shruti turned her foreign internship into a fairytale caught our attention: “Once upon a time there lived a beautiful princess, Shruti. She was blessed with all things good and beautiful, a good college, a good CGPA and lots of opportunities. She was in the prime of her life, her sixth semester, and like every other prince and princess on earth, was busy with her internship applications and interviews.”
The most common lines, somehow, were:
- The HR woman was very beautiful.
- The HR woman was really pretty.
- The HR woman was so attractive.
I am starting to doubt that HR recruitments are entirely fair.
Is there any better way to learn about all types of internships than this? Did a marketing internship once? You got nothing on me, I read 22 marketing internship stories. Ask me anything about marketing internships. Go on. I didn’t even know who Kotler was before the contest. Now I can tell every marketing intern’s mind is preoccupied with whether his theories work or not.
By far the most important realization is that interns are an organization’s biggest brand ambassadors. Treat them well and they will boost your image enthusiastically among their network; treat them indifferently and they will badmouth you like nothing else. This is largely because interns do not have the compulsions of permanent employees, and once they are done with their internship you can be certain they will be brutally honest about your company. Treat your interns well!
Internshala has been always asserting that internships affect lives more than we give them credit for, and the contest validated this belief. Read the stories for yourself to see.
