Interns these days have really good skills and could be handy, especially for startups – Second Light
Ajay Pal Singh, co-founder and CEO at Second Light, recently spoke to us, and shared his experience with interns in his startup. He believes internship with a startup is a valuable experience and could teach even more than a job. Below are the excerpts of the talk.
Q. What is your philosophy behind having an internship programme at Second Light?
Being a startup, finance is always a challenge and having good interns is always helpful, being more affordable compared to a full time developer. Since they get a work experience with us, we can offer them placement later, ( if they enjoyed what they did and we did too) as they know the company culture and we could save time of training them on job again. Besides, these days interns have good skills as well.
Q. What are the skills/attributes that you look in a candidate while hiring interns?
First of all, we look for how responsible the person is. We give them small tasks, and those who communicate properly, even though the task might be done partly, we go ahead with them. Technical skills are important but as long the the basics are good, they can be taught. We don’t expect them to be full fledged developers from the day 1 but we are looking for people who want to learn and ready to put in effort.
Q. What has been the contribution of interns in your company? Any major task that you have done with the help of interns?
We have interns for development, UI and graphics and they have done really good work. They helped design the UI for our application, dashboard, logo, concept video and related stuff and helped in the development of the website. At times, the development took more time, but that is always a trade off, between interns and full time employees.
Q. In your opinion, what are the major take-aways for a student from an internship at a start-up?
Learn, learn and learn.
Internship with a startup is a valuable experience and it could teach you even more than what you learn in a job at a big company. At end of the day, we treat them as interns and expect mistakes will happen, but they should keep pushing themselves to learn and work. The interns should communicate well if they are facing any issues.
Q. Any funny/weird incident that happened with any of your interns that you would like to share with us?
We have an intern from Germany and she has come to Bangalore to work with us. It was impressive and also funny at times, to see her adjusting to Indian lifestyle. She is a part of the team and we hang out a lot and she cooks for the team at times :)
Q. A message that you would like give to the companies/start-ups running internship programmes?
Interns should be treated as interns and not as free labour or full time employees. Interns should not be expected to do everything on their own. Help them and keep motivating them. We believe in paying as much possible to interns and we also offer them more if they give output. We also encourage students to communicate and tell us if they are facing any issues, so that we can be prepared in advance.
Q. What is your message to students who are looking for internships?
Students should start with a decent resume.They should communicate well during the internship. If they want a good internship, they should work hard and submit themselves to learning. Stipend might be good, but that should not be their sole purpose. If they work well, money shall follow.
If you’re an employer and want to share your experience of running an internship programme, or want to hire interns for your own organization, drop a line at shadab@internshala.com. We’d love to hear from you.
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