My Journey with Internshala

Varun Kakumani is a Web Developer and Security Engineer at Internshala. He shares how his journey with Internshala began unexpectedly and has been till now.

I don’t know how to start and where to start. But I have to start from somewhere, so let me start with my introduction. Many people call me hacker, some call me a programmer, and some call me a guy who can’t even pass a JNTU exam. Well, all the three are true. We have our final semester examinations within a month and I am in my final year doing some boring project on Apache High Availability Clusters. Nobody in my class ever said anything about internships, not even our faculty, may be they thought its not important or they might be too busy copy pasting their project documentations(thanks to Bill Gates).

Okay, lets stop that lengthy boring stuff about me. Coming to my real story. I am very curious about application security and  once I was searching for an internship on the Internshala portal when I found some loopholes in HP educational services website (don’t get confused, its an ad on the Internshala homepage). So, I reported it to HP web admin and he did not believe me, so I gave a small demo, which created a huge problem for them, after which they had a talk with Sarvesh, who in turn spoke to me over email, stating that even Internshala was hacked on the same day. Its the longest email I’ve ever received in my lifetime; I completed reading it in 15 minutes.

Then I told him that I never hacked Internshala, but I can help regarding this. So, I had an interview with Anuj. It was a long interview and also my first interview. It was more like discussing and sharing technology, so I enjoyed the interview. Then from the next day onward, my job was to hack Internshala. That was the first time in my life that I was hacking with permission! So basically my job was to report bugs and do some coding stuff. Then one day, Vikram asked for my help in developing Virtual Training Center (an Online Training program for students) and I said yes. We started making an awesome product and it is finally done as well as we expected. With every positive feedback we get from VTC students, we feel proud to be part of Internshala.

Even after the three months of completion of my internship I did not received any internship certificate from Internshala, because it is only for students and not for an “Employee of Internshala”. Now I am web developer and Security Engineer at Internshala.