Summer Internship with Berger Paints – Harry from IIM Ranchi

Wildcard Entry for: –  2nd August 2012

Name of the intern: –  Harry

Institute: –  IIM Ranchi

Organization interned with: –  Berger Paints India Limited

My first rendezvous with the managerial world: After the short vacation home, it was time to embark on a new journey, somewhere I had never been. Being a fresher, I started off my journey with a mixed bag of emotions. For the first time I was about to experience what being a part of an organization was like.

And boy, was it some pressure with starting off your journey at the head office of India’s second biggest paint company–making a part of me nervous, at the same time I was being anxious to know what it was like to be a part of professional world. Knowing that the hours of commencement of the journey were coming near made it all more exciting.

So, in April I started my journey from my home town to Kolkata. We were briefed that there would be a 2 day induction program and then we would get our respective projects and locations. In total 14 interns were taken in from B-Schools like IIM’s, XIMB and IMT. The induction program started with GM Retail briefing us about the company, products and the respective projects over the next two days. And the course of these two days we got to interact with the company COO, Marketing Heads and various other high-profile people. This was really exciting, where else would you get a chance to interact with the leading people of such a big company and gain knowledge from them? It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

I was given a project in Delhi, which is one of the biggest markets for the company. The project required a marketing survey and some marketing inputs in order to increase their sales for their emulsion products. The project was critical for the company as the COO himself said, “Buddy, you have a tough task at hand, you have to find a solution that our managers are looking for for the past couple of years.” And I could not have asked for more because I knew that I had got a real opportunity to learn, and I was right.

So on the 3rd day I, with another intern, left for Delhi; where the real action was. I was told that my mentor was one of their best managers and soon I came to know why. As soon I reached Delhi and contacted him, he called me to office and after a bit of briefing directly took me to a series of contractor meetings.

Starting my day at 8:00 am in the morning and ending at around 9:00 pm (including travel from my room to office) I got the hang of how it was like to be working in a company and that too in a metropolitan city. Since the scope of my project was vast, from interacting with dealers, contractors and customers to find out the reasons of the low sale and market share, I got a chance to work with the business development team too. So all these meant that I had to visit the market daily, hence I had to work closely with their sales team and business development team. Unlike a Finance internship where one might get the luxury of sitting in an office doing some data crunching, the marketing profile made sure I did not get into a comfort zone and always tested my mental endurance (and physical endurance too, sometimes) and the increasing temperature, Delhi’s traffic only added to the daily challenges.

Working alongside the sales team gave me good first-hand experience about how things work in reality; and things are totally different from classrooms, I can guarantee that. This included visiting dealers in different parts of Delhi and getting to know what their problems were and visiting the contractors and knowing their expectations from the company. In all, I understood that we may segment different functions in a company but they all are interlinked and even the smallest problem in one of the functions can lead to bigger problems which are hard to anticipate unless you do a thorough study of them. Small shortcomings in servicing or a delay in giving the promised benefits can cause a company to face decrease in sales and crumbling relations with its various stakeholders.

So, time passed by and the learning just did not seem to end. In all it was one of the most enriching experiences I had had in my life, and at last a very enjoyable phase of my learning came to an end. Getting a chance to put in practice what we learned and seeing its results coming up was one of the best experiences of my internship. So with lots of learning and fun, my internship ended on a high note.

Editor’s note: You can look for similar meaningful internships on Internshala.