Abhinav (MT1) Domain: Research (Data Analysis)
Interned at INSEAD, France
Mode: Online
Interviewed by: Anuradha Barnwal
INTRODUCTION
I am Abhinav, a 3rd year Mathematics and Computing student. I am also a Chief Editor in BSP. I have done three research internships and one corporate internship in the past.
Previous experience
My corporate intern was at Boat after my first year. It was in the product role. During my second year, I managed to get three research interns, the first one was at FMS, the Faculty for Management Studies. During winter, I did a research internship at IIM Ahmedabad, and finally at INSEAD Business School, France.
Motivation
Within the first two semesters, it was evident to me that STEM wasn't where I wished to go. For IIT students who don't want to go into STEM, the available career fields then are finance, consulting, private equity, and venture capital, and get a MIM or an MBA down the line. Since I'll be pursuing management in the future, I wanted to get early hands-on experience.
Process of Application
Regarding the timeline, I had a cover letter ready by the end of September, a mailing list during the first two weeks of October, and I had started sending 10 personalised emails per day. Try contacting seniors you know who have interned in that field or school/company. Have them look over your CV or get recommendations by them. With this schedule, I landed my IIM Ahmedabad internship in November, and started working on it right before my FMS internship ended in January. Both FMS and IIM Ahmedabad interns definitely helped my application. The reason I chose INSEAD is because being one of the top management schools in Europe, it'd be a great addition to my resume.
Pre-Internship Preparations, Apprehensions, and Perceptions
The primary factor that helped me land those internships was a domino effect, which meant that my subsequent internships were even more valuable than the last. Since I could evidence that I have worked under someone else, I have experience in internships and experience in a specific domain, data analysis, which significantly improved my profile. Overall, I had sent over 1200 emails throughout the journey. It was challenging, to say the least, but it all worked out in the end.
The INSEAD intern was under a professor who wanted to do research about investor behaviour in Europe post-COVID. The initial prediction was that investors would increasingly start investing in healthcare and technology after COVID-19 for multiple reasons. Multiple scholarly papers have been published that pointed to that. We wanted to ascertain those findings, find why they happened, and draw a logical chain of events between the reasons for these investors investing in specific stocks using bibliographic analysis.
Experience, Challenges, and Takeaways
Since it was an online internship, my deadlines were pretty chill. Using bibliographic analysis, we created cluster mappings that allowed us to narrow it down to about 300 research papers from the 20,000 papers we had. After that, we managed to locate specific paragraphs using the same technique that provided us with a tiny corpus we then had to go through manually and reduced our work by many folds. Keep in mind that professors know that you are a student, and the work that you have been given is also not something that will be very transformational or field specific.
Regarding personal work experience, it was slightly unfortunate that the other interns I was working with were on site, yet I was working on a virtual machine and working on the same project. But yes, we used to get on calls and converse about several things. It was definitely exciting for me to interact with people from different countries and different nationalities. And I'm hoping to follow through on a few of my promises to them to meet with them at some point in our lives. During my time as an intern I got along really well with the Professor; he was also from Delhi. He interned at McKinsey before moving to academia and gave me some advice on preparing for the internship period.
Apart from that, I'm satisfied with the work I did during my internship and how I went beyond expectations and deadlines. The professor was pleased and impressed with my work, which meant that in the future, whenever I apply for something like a master's or a PhD, I would have a good LOR to bank upon.
Personal Takeaways
The kind of interactions that we have with our batch mates, juniors, seniors, acquaintances, and friends at college is very different from something that you have in a corporate office, research, or any kind of workplace.
There is a specific manner in which you are supposed to behave; there is a certain balance of professionalism and frankness that you are supposed to have when interacting with people, which I managed to integrate within myself. This allowed me to navigate more positively with people because you are not making friends during your internships. You are socialising to a large extent. The importance of doing well in these environments and maintaining a pleasant relationship with co-workers was revealed to me during this internship.
Key Advice to Juniors
Offline foreign internships provide insights and opportunities that cannot be replicated with online internships.
While I do agree these procedures take a toll on your mental health, don't lose hope. Reach out to seniors and your friends. And just keep up the research about how you can work on your approach.
The later you apply, the less likely you are to get an internship. The environment in which you will compete gets challenging and more difficult as you get later.
Keep in mind that you should apply for domains you will likely get into. Management, Security, Machine learning/AI, LLP, and Computer Vision are all domains in which you will likely get an internship. A domain such as theoretical mathematics is one in which few research internships are available. Do a bit of research on which domains are receiving a lot of funding.
Comentários