In Indian engineering colleges, a student’s status and self-worth are determined primarily by below two things
1. Summer internship stipend
2. Final CTC
The companies that bestow the highest status upon you are the familiar names — Big Tech or FAANG, top investment banks, etc.
Back in 2019, all of my college friends had internship offers in hand. I had a full-time offer from Barclays, but no internship.
A few weeks later, Nvidia came for internships. Luckily, I got in.
But my friends only sympathized with me because the stipend I was going to get was < 25k, unlike their 60k FAANG internship stipends.
Nvidia wasn't mainstream or top-tier then.
My friends pitied me and advised to look for off-campus opportunities.
I felt compelled to seek better opportunities to reclaim my self-worth.
Then, a twist of fate.
I landed an internship at Goldman Sachs.
Now, I was going to get a whopping ~75k stipend, the highest in my batch, and high enough to restore my self-worth.
I decided to ditch Nvidia for 50k more cash.
A few days back, Nvidia surpassed Apple with a market cap of $3 trillion.
The CEO, Jensen Huang, has a net worth of $100 billion.
Undoubtedly, if someone were to get a summer internship at Nvidia today, they'd be regarded with awe and admiration.
And me, who chose to ditch Nvidia for a more sought-after role, would have comfortably been a millionaire had I stuck around.
Sometimes, the best decisions are the ones we don’t take.
What you would have done if you were in my shoes?
#internships #collegeplacements #offershopping
CompE @ Purdue
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