My Internship Experience at IBM India Software Labs Bangalore

The story of my internship experience began in 25th Feb 2014. IBM recruitment team visited our campus on that day. We had 2 rounds on that day which were based on aptitude evaluation and both the rounds were elimination rounds. Those who cleared both the rounds were announced on that day itself and I was one of them. After few days, they again visited our campus for the programming round in which we were given 4 problems. We had to solve at least 3 of them in the stipulated 1.5 hrs. The problems were easy at the same time tricky too. I was managed to complete 2 problems completely and the third one partially. After 2 days they announced the results and i had cleared as well.

Then on the next day i got a call to attend the personal interview at their campus in one of the tech parks in Bangalore. So i prepared for the interview, went through the data structures and some other core topics of my stream (Information science & Engineering). Also i went through the company's website and understood some of the areas in which they have the presence in the market.

I attended the interview and i was interviewed by 2 people. The first person asked me some very basic things about my stream core topics like C Programming, OOPS concepts, WEB, linux, etc. I did fairly well and answered almost all the questions. So the first person was quite convinced with me and she called one more person to have a discussion with me. This person happened to be her manager which i came to know after stated working there as an intern. So this person interviewed me for almost an hour and i would say that this was one of the most memorable moments of my life. During the course of the discussion this person asked me a range of questions which touched almost all the subjects i studied in my engineering. And i did not answer almost 70% of the questions. In fact at some point of time, he shouted at me saying "Can't you prepare well, knowing that you have an interview?". After few questions when i started answering some of the questions he was bit OK. He told me that in spite of the fact that i didn't answer 70% of his questions, what he liked in me the most is that whenever i feel i don't know the answer i used say no directly without any hesitation. And this gave me a sort of relief at a time when i was struggling to answer. After almost one hour we came out of the interview room and he came along with till the ground floor and escorted me and spoke to me very friendly in a as if was selected (which i could feel somehow).

Then i came back to my room and i had just reached my room , i received a call from company saying that i was selected and i felt ecstatic. They told me that my joining date is 11 Mar 2014 and sent me few documents to fill and instructions.

So the day came and the first day 11 Mar was the induction day. I completed all the formalities on that day. The next day is the day i actually went felt the corporate environment. One of my friend had joined one week before me. On this day i was explained all the work i need to do and i was provided a Lenovo thinkpad.

To start with the first week was spent in research and from next week i actually started working. We had to develop a web application which would be deployed as a service in the cloud. In the course i learnt many things which i couldn't during engineering. Every monday we used to have status meetings and my manager used to encourage us in all the possible ways.

Overall the journey was fun and was filled with lot party times and outings. After one month two more interns joined from National Institute of Design, Bangalore. Both of them worked on user interface and user experience design and we had to adopt their design into our application. This was a Herculean task for us and somehow we managed to to that. I learnt a lot about design with these intern guys .

After one more month 1 intern from IIT Bombay joined. I was surprised and had a proud feeling that i was working with IIT guys. I learnt a lot from this guy and the way IITians are trained and how they are different from rest of the engineers. Finally my 3 months came to an end on June 10.

This entire internship experience boosted my confidence as an engineer. I still feel that this internship period was my first job and this is the one which made become what i am today. And my message to the people who are eager to do an internship goes like this, " No matter in which company you do the internship, just make sure that you do it because the kind of confidence you get at the end of it will be parallet to none". All the best !

- By Ramesh P Mirji
College: PES Institute of Technology
Internship @ IBM India Software Labs Bangalore
Duration: 3 months