I wanted a job at TCS Digital. Here’s how I made it happen through internships.
About the author: Awanish Kumar Singh is a 4th-year student at the Greater Noida Institute of Technology. He dreamt of getting a job at TCS Digital in his first year and bagged the same this year. In this story, he talks about the role of internships in landing this job.
When my college offered a choice between attending classes or interning in the 4th year, I decided to intern. At college, you tend to learn theory. I wanted to work on live projects and the real problems we face in society, so I opted for internships. In my 3rd year, I had made 5-6 back-end projects. I uploaded these projects on my Internshala resume and started applying for internships. These projects helped me secure my first internship at Ramsuns Technologies.
After being shortlisted based on my application, I got an invite for a 1.5 hour interview. The interviewer asked me questions regarding my projects and some technical questions related to Java back-end development, such as:
1. What is a springboard?
2. What is the Rest API?
3. What is Java servlet?
Apart from this, there were common HR interview questions such as:
4. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
5. How do you manage your time?
In addition to this round, I also had to submit some assignments, which I uploaded on GitHub. I got an offer letter after 2 days and joined the company as an intern.
During the 3 months of this internship, I worked on full-stack development and developed a project from scratch. I had to create REST APIs then call these APIs to show the data from the back-end. In addition to this, I had to document my code and write unit test cases for the code. I also picked new skills like AngularJS and Bootstrap.
I started this internship before my exam time. However, my mentor was very understanding and asked me to focus on my examinations more than my internship. I was also able to take a leave of 15 days to focus on my exams. Whenever I had some spare time, I would work on my tasks.
When this internship ended, I started looking for more and got one at Newgen Payments. This is an in-office internship, and I am interning as a back-end developer. Doing an in-office internship is a new experience because it is my first time working in a corporate environment. Working at home was a bit solitary. At the office, I am working with a team of 10 people and am also learning to communicate in a professional environment. I find that the learning process at the office is higher in comparison to working from home as I am also spending more time with my mentor. Working on a fast laptop instead of my home computer doesn’t hurt either!
Doing these 2 internships gave me so much confidence that I got through the hiring process for my dream job at TCS Digital. Only 300 students around the country get this role, and I am the only one in my college who got it.
TCS had an off-campus placement for the 2022 cohort, and I applied via their careers website. You can apply for the drive after the completion of the third year. Post this, they schedule an examination, and you receive an email regarding it. This exam can be given in a test centre or remotely.
After clearing my exam, I got a selection email for the next round. It consisted of 2 coding questions. It was followed by the interview round, which consisted of a technical interview and an HR interview. I was able to clear the technical rounds because of the internships. The HR round was unusual; instead of asking me common interview questions, they asked questions such as:
1. Tell me something about your academics.
2. If you get an offer letter from Wipro or any start-up companies you are interning at, would you join TCS? If another company offers you higher compensation, would you join that company?
Rather than giving ideal responses, I answered these questions honestly, which I believe helped me crack this round. Other than this, having prior experience through internships was beneficial. I got the offer letter a few days back and am excited about joining the company.
Do you think internships can help you get your dream job? Then, register on Internshala to get started.
