Summer Internship in Mumbai – My 60 first dates with Johnson and Johnson
About Author: Trisha is a final year Management student at Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Mumbai. She interned with Johnson&Johnson in the field of Operations in Mumbai.
The rendezvous with Johnson & Johnson had been very inspiring from the very start. Their entire process of selecting interns was different from those of other firms. The team from Johnson & Johnson consisted of people with expertise in different streams. They tested candidates more on their group skills rather than individual smartness. They spent ample amount of time per candidate to locate the best fits for the offered profile and the company itself. My happiness had no bounds the moment they signaled me a thumbs-up by saying, “We look forward to meeting you at our campus.”
And finally the day came when I had to join Johnson and Johnson as a summer intern. Though it was not my first stint in the corporate world, it definitely was a totally different experience with a new organization and completely different set of expectations. I was both excited as well as nervous about the new set of responsibilities that awaited me. ‘My 60 first dates with J&J’ – this is how I would describe my internship at Johnson and Johnson- Consumer, India. Everyday had something new in store – new challenges, new things to learn, and new set of people to interact with. This was all due to the wide scope of the project that I was allocated. It required me to interact and gather inputs from people specializing in different functions across teams like Marketing, Sourcing, Logistics, Planning, Project Management, Regulatory, Quality & Control, Finance, Engineering, and so on. I was fortunate to get an opportunity to interact with so many people instead of being limited to one team. That has helped me appreciate the holistic picture of processes being followed.
The best part was the kind of support that everyone in the organization was willing to provide me starting from a very busy set of managers to campus recruits who were just a year old in the organization. I could walk into my manager’s cubicle any time without thinking twice and trouble her with my novice questions. I admire the patience she and other members of my team had to entertain my stupid questions. Though I was there only for 2 months, I never felt like ‘Alice in lost land’. Everyone starting from my team to HR tried to make the environment as warm as possible. They invited interns to parties and those were the places where everyone was completely informal. A mix of formal and informal relationship made the workplace lively and warm. This gave me enough reasons to understand why Johnson & Johnson as a company is considered one of the best companies to work for and why the employees stay with the company for as long as 30 to 40 years.
My 2 months journey was full of learning. I saw how the concepts being taught by our professors become the foundation for companies to grow and survive. Working in a leading organization helped me integrate my functional knowledge of management with practicality and at the same time provided me a big platform to interact and learn even more.
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