How Internships humble you.

Hello peeps. Hope you have all been holding good! This is just my second ever LinkedIn article. So welcome all to my narrative of what internships really mean to me, what I have learnt, what have I unlearnt, what I have re learnt and other stuff that might interest you and probably might add value to your own experiences as well.

I was an Assistant Manager at a reputed private player in the BFSI sector handling mostly branch banking roles. I have worked with 3 to 4 locations over a tenure of about 2 years. Before that I did a full fledged paid internship with a leading national lender in the Forex market of Pondy and TN region during my MBA summers. Apart from that, I did some B2B sales internship and alternate channel conversions with a leading private player in the automotive and industrial battery market. I will delve into those experiences in the later part of this series.

After I decided to foray into research and academia, I quit my banking job. Then took some two months off, managed to clear the NET Junior Research Fellowship exam conducted by the NTA. My next near academic calendar was far off, probably some 6-7 months away. With the fellowship in my hand and having a lot of time to experiment, I again knocked on the doors of a guess what? Internship again. It was an e-commerce startup that has its vision to empower the women of our lives by branding their secret superpowers. The founder and the COO both interviewed me, enquiring me about my background and why I wanted to be a part of a startup at this particular stage of my life.

I told them exactly the truth and they were magnanimous enough to accept my tenure. At the beginning, I had applied for an English content writer position, only to find out during the very interview that they had no dearth of people in that position. But I loved their vision and was so eager to fit in. During the course of the conversation though, my boss (later) figured out that I can write real good content in Tamil, having worked with a reputed Tamil magazine as a student journalist in the past. He gave me a caption, wanted me to translate it in apt tamil and Bingo! He said “You’re in!”

Now having said that, what I have experienced through this particular internship was quite different from my earlier ones. Because this was a startup and they were constantly drawing and re drawing their boundaries. As they were experimenting with everything, we even had our roles change every now and then. Earlier I was into content, then into Market Research and so did the other people’s roles evolve over time. My team was a very dynamic one. We had 21 year old kids straight out of college doing everything from designing to packaging to photoshoots to organising logistics and content. We even had teeny tiny colleagues who were still attending college but churned our amazing creatives and content out of thin air. And we had some real professionals guiding them.

Now I was amazed at this whole setup. All I knew my whole life was hierarchy, red tape, bureaucracy and bull shit.(Sorry for the lingo here but it’s true). To even get a sign for a single challan, we have to stand like old Nambiar’s Kabali and say yes sir yes sir with the most humble tone. And here was a team, that knew no such fake practices of idolatry and even had a director of GSD ( get s#*t done, this one is copywrited btw). Swear words were not uncommon but only for meeting the deadline. Parties were even more common but only after a proper week’s slog.

In fact my boss didn’t shy away from the idea of a beach house office near ECR. We had a referendum and it was decided against it because of the long commutes involved for most of the team. The whole point is that he feared nothing, dreamt big and took calculated risks all the while trying to convert this dream of his into reality. There was nothing left unthought of, the marker ink on the drawing boards and the glass walls of the co working space we shared with a leading cine marketing firm of the country never dried.

Now stop here. I am not going to fool you with the notion that my risk appetite grew and I turned an extrovert overnight or was inspired to become an entrepreneur seeing him straightaway and all those Suryavamsam kinda stories. I am the complete anti-thesis of my boss and I know this and he probably knows this better. Am probably the most mediocre, middle class minded , safe haven seeking, comfortable lazy a**hole you can probably find in the whole South Asiatic region. Am still an academic and a bureaucratic one at that being hard wired to the core. I even found my fellowship and accepted it. As noble as my future profession may be,I still have to accept the fact that am a risk averse person. But I cannot be too hard on myself for that. Being brought up in a conservative family all my life for more than a quarter of a century, I would only be surprised if I undid all that wiring too soon.

Meanwhile my boss had a working model of his ideas and was in the process of finding investors before the COVID-19 crisis stumbled the whole world to a standstill. He had found a lot of critical and economical success through his earlier entrepreneurial ventures. He could have just lived off that money lavishly for the rest of his life by simply saving, investing or directly trading in the stock market for he was an active trader himself. But instead he chose his next hard path, his next mission. That signifies the very nature of the entrepreneurial spirit. He will make his path succeed no matter what, that am pretty damn sure of.

Now you may ask what a person like me is doing in a startup headed by a man like that. First things first, from day one they knew what I was upto, still placed their bets on me. I was not going to be a permanent resource, at the most may be an on and off. But they didn’t hate me for that. They knew that I had a goal in life and they respected it. They also knew my skillsets and channelised those properly. They didn’t want me to conform to their ideals and judge me when I stepped out of that line. Instead they carved out new roles for me which offered me greater flexibility as well as find out where I am able to contribute maximum for the company. That to me was not a mere win win situation. That signifies to me a champion work culture that they waned to cultivate in the near future.

Also I realised the joy of building something from scratch which cannot be described in words. The karma of doing something just for the ecstasy of it is a killer dopamine. Money and other stuff can only follow that feeling of being part of a creative process. Of course, there are no free lunches in this world and we have to pay our bills. But come on guys, I can have a thousand other jobs that can pay my bills comfortably and still work or be associated with a start up for even free. Startups, particularly like the one I was a part of, are dope. They are all learning, all hands on, all getting messy and playing nano gods.

Rather than seeing me as a paper geek who might be a burden to the company, they triggered me to strive to be the industry-academia knowledge gap bridger that will be an asset for the future. And all these while, I was just talking about my own experience. This was the case of a lot of young college going kids who wanted to be a part of the team and contribute as well. They were laying the careful foundation for a human culture of a next generational startup based out of ever evolving ideas and solid ethos. The COVID-19 is just a phase of hibernation for a lot of startups and MSMEs like ours. The idea may evolve, the people may change, the funding may come and go but only the leaders with an impeccable culture will sustain.

So far through the experience, I have learnt to leverage whatever resources I have in my hand, unlearnt the unnecessary stigma related with atleast calculated risk taking for a great deal(would never bluff that I had done that fully), relearnt and reinforced that keeping human beings at the prime of whatever you do is the core of whatever empire that you strive to build.

Kudos for making it to the end of this write up and this is just the part 1 of a multipart series that I have planned to write over the course of the next few weeks. And do stay safe,peeps. Quarantine and Chill.