Summer Internship with BHEL — Namesh from NIT Allahabad
Wildcard Entry for: – 12th August 2012
Name of the intern: – Namesh
Institute: – NIT Allahabad
Organization interned with: – BHEL
People say summer internships are the time when a student gets to understand the realities of the field he is in while working. A trailer of a movie he is supposed to watch for the rest of his life. And yes, the trailer of my movie was one hell of a power packed adventure thriller.
As a civil engineering student, one is expected to get a basic overview of how a construction site works and get a chance to witness practically all the theoretical knowledge he gains over the period of his course. Excited also was a small word to express what my classmate Bahni and I were going through when we got a chance to undergo our summer internships at Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), one of the largest public sector organizations in the country. The icing on the cake was the location of the internships allotted at New Delhi which meant endless shopping in malls, plenty of sight-seeing along the historical locations of Delhi and getting a chance to live in the capital of the country for three months.
Having reached New Delhi just a day before the 1st day of the internships, we immediately contacted our senior under whom we were supposed to work who gave us the location of the site we were posted to. So excited were we that we didn’t even care to listen to the entire address and ended up searching for a construction site of a thermal power plant amidst a residential area in Noida, just to realize half a day later that the site was actually some 70 km away at Bawana in Haryana from where we actually were. Too tired even to make an effort to turn back, we went back home thinking of the first day of our internship and our poor senior who must had spent his entire phone balance explaining to us the location and yet us managing up to end up in the opposite part of the city.
Every single day of the next one month had a fixed routine to follow. Leaving our home from Lodi road as early as 7 in the morning, we used to park our vehicle near the nearest metro station. What followed was a 1 hour long journey in the metro changing two different routes in between. If lady luck was smiling, we would just reach right on time at the Rithala metro station where the company bus would come to pick us up for a further journey of 20kms through a dusty road. But so great used to be our luck that we only managed to catch the bus thrice in the entire month in spite of our best efforts to leave at the earliest. The only option left was to travel 15 km in a rickety countryside minibus and the last 5 km to be covered by foot or taking lift from every possible mode of transportation; ranging from a bicycle, a cycle cart to a road roller, excavator, trailer and even a piling crane in the sweltering heat of May. Such was our plight that 6 hours of a day was spent travelling to and from the site.
What we did on site was entirely a different story altogether. The summer internship at BHEL was supposed to give us a basic exposure and introduction to construction of a pile foundation for a power plant. Along with the technical exposure, what we also got to see was the dedication and passion the engineers and the staff had to give for the project to go smoothly. There was even an instance where we witnessed the engineers celebrating and rejoicing for the completion of the concreting of a single structure in the same way as one would celebrate their birthday. That left us thinking about the kind of lives we would end up having 10 years down the line as that of a civil engineer.
Nevertheless that didn’t stop us from visiting every major place of attraction in New Delhi, cover up each and every chain of fast food outlets present in the city and at the same time go to all the places nearby in the weekends. During the ending phase of our internship we were assigned the task of creating a video documentary showing the piling procedures executed in the site which was an interesting perspective. But what was challenging was somehow coaxing the workers at the site to repeat the construction procedure and wasting their time and energy so that we could shoot it; which no one, of course, agreed to. In the end after numerous attempts we had to remain content by preparing a traditional project report and submitting it, having to face the angry glances of our senior who thought we were a couple of lazy sloth bears and nothing more. In the end our senior was so disappointed in us to the level that we had to slip the project report under his door at his residence and run away just so that we wouldn’t have to listen to his talks again. And that was how my summer internship ended!
Editor’s note – You can also look for similar invigorating internships on Internshala.
