I couldn’t get into any top college. 12 internships and 3 years later I’ve created my own path to success.

About the Author: Ayushi Grover is pursuing B.Tech in Information Technology from Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Engineering, Delhi. She talks about how she did various internships during college and developed her own roadmap to success.

After the typical Indian engineering entrance tyranny, I got into a college that I hadn’t set my eyes on and a phase of depression followed. I wanted to get out of college happy but didn’t know how. I hadn’t realized the difference between school and college – the difference between theory and practical! After the first year, I came to know about internships and how they were the medium to gain practical knowledge. A senior told me about an internship platform and little did I know that this lovely thing called Internshala would turn my life around!

I was interested in the field of writing and marketing, so I prepared my profile keeping those interests in mind and started applying. Soon, I received a call from the company PriceGenie and after a brief telephonic interview, I was hired. The stipend wasn’t much, but my motive was to gain experience since it was going to be my first internship. The internship lasted for 2 months. I had to compete with other students and make a name for the tech brand in my circles, and I won the first prize all over India in their contest. My journey had just begun.

Next, I was shortlisted for the content writing role at NinefineStuf. I was asked to submit some writing samples for them after which I was hired. I worked on building a new product from scratch and gave it all my time and efforts. From coining names to categories to promoting it on social media, I monitored everything and put my heart into it. I even recruited and managed a team of interns for writing articles. However, I was grossly underpaid and after 9-10 months I had to resign. I knew the value of my potential now!

I again started applying and was hired as a content writer intern for Giftxoxo. I shared some of my writing samples after which I was selected. This was a 2-months internship after which I took a break to concentrate on my studies. I learned the basics of coding in college which helped in developing my analytical skills. During this brief hiatus, I got a call from a company Sirez for a content writing role. I was referred to them by my previous employer and after some discussions, I began my fourth internship. They were working on a mobile application for new mothers and pregnant women. My work involved writing articles to help those women deal with the new addition to their family. I got a handsome payment and really liked the work I was doing.

The winter break was approaching, and so I again turned to my trusted source, Internshala. After applying to a few companies, I was shortlisted by Infoboard for the profile of Data Interpretation and Infographic creation. During the selection process, I was asked various questions based on current affairs and statistics as most of my work involved around news items and data analysis. This was my first full-time internship, and I used to work on the daily news items to create content for specific age groups. By the time this internship ended, I could see a lot of change in myself. From being a dissatisfied fresher, I had become the person who had done most internships in my class.

The new semester brought with it a new wave of opportunities. My college organized a competition called Nagarro Bootcamp and I was selected for the training program. I learned Java, data structures, and few other technical skills for free. I had gained experience in the field of writing, and now I wanted to achieve the same in my field of study i.e. engineering. I worked on some projects in college involving UI-UX development and also attended some workshops organized by Internshala. I also took an online course on Android development and practiced different concepts. Then, I started applying for the technical internships for the first time.

Soon, I was shortlisted for the Android Development profile by Syncspire. I was asked to share the links of the applications that I had worked on and further questions were asked regarding the problems I faced while building them and how I overcame them. Some technical questions were also asked to check my coding abilities and analytical skills. When I was finally hired, I was ecstatic! It was again a full-time internship, and I created various applications that catered to different markets and clients. I also learned what working with a team actually meant!

The summer break was approaching when I got to know about the technical internships at Airport Authority of India from some of my friends. I also applied with them through AAI’s official website (yes, my first internship without Internshala’s support!). The selection was on the basis of resume and thanks to a number of previous internships and projects, my resume was a solid one. I was shortlisted and after a technical interview, I was hired! I got a chance to work with some of the finest engineers at AAI’s Safdarjung Centre while making an Android application for their inventory.

The placement season was going to begin, and I was all set to grab both tech and non-tech jobs. And yes, I got placed in Ernst & Young! People thought it was my first experience with interviews but they didn’t know that all those internship interviews and work experience had prepared me well. Thus, my placement interview went smooth and mostly focused on the internships that I had done.

My tryst with internships didn’t stop after placement. In the final year, as I had a lot of time, I did four more internships through Internshala. Two of them involved SEO and content development for SuperProfs and StudyCopter. For SuperProf, I was asked to design an email marketing campaign using a software called MailChimp to showcase my creativity and writing skills. They liked it and I was hired. My work involved writing SEO rich blogs on various competitive exams for achieving higher Google rankings. I learned a lot about SEO and different exams during this internship which in turn helped me bag my next internship for the same profile at StudyCopter. There, I utilized the knowledge that I had gained to write and proofread content that was used to prepare students for various competitive exams.

I next interned at Babygogo, a child health care startup. During the selection process, I was asked to frame some recipes for infants and to write an article about the importance of child healthcare. After I was hired, I wrote various blogs and listicles for children below the age of five.

Most of these internships were virtual and I rarely had to visit the office. Many of them also overlapped so that I could make the most of my time. It also helped in a smooth transition between projects as it wasn’t possible to get an internship as soon as the previous one got over. In short, I never sat idle. Many factors have helped me reach where I’m today. I’ve seen my own share of failures, but I’ve always learned from them. And from all those lessons, two things that I would recommend to every student would be:

1. Work hard on your Internshala resume – Nothing can beat the impact that a first impression creates. I’ve religiously added every important detail to my resume – from every project I did in college, every training I registered for, and details about all the previous internships. If you’ve any doubts, just look at your resume score – that should be an enough motivation. My resume score is 100, but even then I face many rejections. So, you can understand how tough the competition is out there.
2. Pay full attention to the answers you give in the assignments and sample tests. Even if you apply for the same profile (say content writing), create a custom answer for every company and follow it up with an email to their HR. This doubles your chances of selection.

I’ve understood that the name of your college or the age-old theoretical knowledge doesn’t matter; you only hold the key to your success. I did a few more internships, and I’m a freelancer now and work only on the things that I love (like food blogging at SoDelhi). Such is the power of internships and I can’t thank Internshala enough for transforming my life. Whatever I do, wherever I go, I’ll never stop learning. Hence, I’ll always be an intern!