SocialCops Internships: The Why, What and Who Answered

“Intern, who?” This is the answer, or a question, from SocialCops interns if anybody refers to them as “interns”. And, why not? None of our interns work as “interns” at SocialCops, so why should they get addressed as one?

Too often, companies give interns the work that full-time employees refuse to do, or need some form of assistance with. Interns are given responsibilities with insignificant, little or no contribution to the company’s actual work. But every decision at SocialCops is made by 20 and 30-somethings who are looking to make a difference with their work. If somebody walks into our office today and try to spot the interns, it is highly likely that they won’t be able to do so. Our interns work alongside the team on independent projects, take ownership over their work, make decisions and drive projects just like any regular employee at SocialCops.

How often do we find interns interning with the same organization more than once? Almost never, right? Because students like to maximize their learning by gaining new experiences and doing different internships. But at SocialCops, we make sure that we provide ample opportunities to help our interns grow and learn new things. This is the reason that most of our interns end up extending their internships, do consecutive internships with us, work part-time, and then join in full-time roles after their graduation.

The longest streak someone has done is 3 internships — we call people who come back multiple times Super Interns! As Divyansh, our former Super Intern and now a full-time member of our team, says,

“If you join SocialCops in your first year, you are spoilt for life.”

Why do we care about building this kind of internship experience? One of our core values at SocialCops is “One Team”. This means that each of our team members — irrespective of their background, experience, gender, age or race — is treated with equal respect. We have always believed in building a meritocracy and have seen that people create incredible growth paths just by taking up new responsibilities.

We’re now looking for our next batch of amazing interns. We are currently offering year-round internship programs for 3-6 months, as well as a 2019 summer internship program. If you are looking for your next challenge and are interested in working with us, keep reading for more information.

What it’s like to intern at SocialCops?

Our interns work with us, not for us

We have always believed that 19-year-olds and 20-somethings can change the world, so we give our interns lots of responsibility. They are expected to solve problems that we have never solved before, and they get evaluated on the same metrics as anybody in a full-time role.

Our interns work alongside our teams on our latest projects — they build features that go live, speak directly to our customers and clients, create and run live marketing and sales campaigns, and more. No matter what team they end up on, our interns all end up doing amazing work. Here are some examples:

• Krishna was an intern in our first summer internship batch in 2014. He picked up data visualization as his area of expertise and worked with us in an almost full-time capacity through his final year of university — building and launching his first product (a DIY tool for maps, Viz) while still in college. He joined SocialCops full-time in 2015 and started working on building our data visualization product Visualize, which now is being used by hundreds of leaders including Prime Minister Modi.
• Tanay, an intern in 2015, joined SocialCops after his graduation in 2016. As a key engineer on our Android team, he scaled the product to 100,000+ users. In early 2018, he stepped up into a leadership role and today leads one of our product teams. (Read about his internship hack week, which was retweeted by Rajan Anandan, Vice President, South East Asia and India, Google.)
• Divyansh, an intern in 2015 and 2016, worked on our early sales and marketing campaigns. Now, as a full-time member of our team, he has picked up the challenge of working with one of our cofounders and taking a new product to market. Just 3 months after graduating, he’s spoken to dozens of potential customers, started a newsletter, hosted AMA sessions with serial entrepreneurs and given talks to college students about entrepreneurship. (Read about his first internship.)
• Ankita joined us in early 2016 as a Research Intern. Today, as a Senior Research Associate, she leads data analysis for some of our biggest government deployments and sets internal standards for our data cleaning and quality processes.
• Astha joined us as a 6-month intern during her final semester, when she was tasked with taking over our social media channels! She soon went on to build our social media voice and created a marketing campaign for our internship program. In her past year of working with us full time, she has gone on to become a full stack marketer for our data collection platform Collect.

These examples aren’t anomalies. One out of every four interns has joined SocialCops full or part-time after their graduation, and one-third of our current employees are ex-interns. Some of our earliest interns have even taken up key leadership roles and evolved to become the pillars of the company.

Fail fast and learn

As a startup, our team gets exposed to lots of opportunities and problems. We might not always know the answer, but it’s important that we keep growing and experimenting. We expect the same thing from our interns!

We look out for people who are passionate about learning, doing new things and have a steep learning curve. We have always hired exceptional interns who we know can do some great work — and to help them do that, we make sure we provide them with the right mentorship, guidance, resources, and support.

A lot of our interns have surprised us by delivering more than what we expected from them and demonstrating our values like “Giving 120%” and “Never Be Satisfied”. They took responsibilities beyond their role, picked up problems that they wanted to solve and figured out ways to contribute through their work in the best possible way. For example,

• Aditi joined us as a Research Intern, but, within a few months of her internship, she decided she wanted to pick up a company level challenge — improving our onboarding processes. She went on to work directly with our founders and leadership team to institute new onboarding processes. (Read her story.)
• Rohan joined us as a Front-End Intern and soon realized that one of our internal products wasn’t updating its users regularly. He decided to take up the self-appointed product evangelist role and started writing release notes himself — which soon went on to become team-wide practice.

We also do regular hackathons and sprints to ensure that our interns get a chance to work on things beyond their regular work at SocialCops. We pick up complex projects, and what follows is hacking, learning and solving problems in the most fun way possible. For example, during one hackathon, some of our engineers created a pricing module for our services team and non-engineers built a technical workflow to automate day-to-day work. Now, how cool is that?

Can you intern at SocialCops?

The short answer will be “Yes, you can.” Identify the role you want to intern for, show us everything that makes you the best fit for the role, brag all you want to about your work and skills in your application form, and we will have you onboard! But first, here are the things to consider before you hit that APPLY button:

Have you picked up the basic skills you’re going to need?

Once you have made up your mind that you want to intern with us, it’s time that you test yourself. As soon as you join us as an intern, you will be given a lot of challenges — including in your application! So it’s important that you are prepared to nail the technical round of your application process. Here’s what you can do to get prepared:

• If you are an engineer, learn the latest frameworks and languages (we use Android, Python, JavaScript, Vue.js, Go, D3.js etc.), use open source projects, and build something — a web app, a native app, etc.
• If you are a data science enthusiast, learn R or Python for data science, work on Kaggle projects, or create your own models/analytical reports using open data. There is a sea of it!
• If you are a growth marketer, learn from the best — Hubspot, Intercom, MixPanel, etc. Do 1-2 real-life projects either in college or using freelance opportunities.

Do you have 3-6 months?

Joining for less than 3 months won’t help you learn as much as possible. Carve out at least 3-6 months for an internship so you can make the most of this experience — figure out our systems, learn from the people around you, and leave your mark! If you can’t join for three months (sorry, Delhi University folks!), reach out and we will try to see if we can figure out something for you.

Are you up for the challenges that are going to be thrown your way?

To make the most out of interning at SocialCops, you have to join us with a mindset to take on new challenges. When you walk in on day one, your hack week will be designed to push you out of your comfort zone. While you will be thrown with daily challenges from your team members, sometimes it might be that random cafeteria conversation with someone from another team followed by a side hack project that might end up being what you learn most from.

The more you give in your internship with us and the more opportunities you take up, the more you’ll end up learning and growing. As one of our Data for Impact fellows, Carson once said, “No matter how much I invest in SocialCops, it always surprises me by investing more in me.” (Read his blog.)

Before you hit the submit button on that application — make sure you’re ready to give your 120% to your internship!

Our open internships

By now, you must have gotten a glimpse of what it is like to intern here. Now let’s talk about the things that you will be working on if you join us as an intern now — the tech stack, the projects, the campaigns and all the things that will make this an internship to remember.

We are at a very interesting phase at SocialCops. On the one hand, some of our products have scaled tremendously and we’re charting out our plans to bring to every organization worldwide. On the other hand, some of our newer products are finding product-market fit — the exhilarating phase of finding the “Aha” moment for our users. Our learnings from scaling our first product and our teams have made our team members great mentors. In a nutshell, an internship at SocialCops today will be the best of all worlds — big problems to solve, big opportunities for go-getters with little past experience to prove their mettle, and some wise mentorship rooted in experience.

Currently, you can intern for the following roles:

Engineering Intern: Help us build frontends, backends and the infrastructure of our current and upcoming products. Our Engineering Team is working to build products that are currently used in over 30 countries. Our interns will work alongside our core team to solve product challenges (e.g. how can we reimagine data exploration for our users?) or core engineering challenges (e.g. how can we scale our architecture, stack and security to cater to our ever increasing customer base?).

Our engineering stack includes Vue.js, Python, JavaScript, Airflow, Javascript, Elastic Search, MongoDB, Node JS, etc. Learn more about our Engineering Team here.

Data Analyst Intern: From data restructuring to analysis, this internship will give you a hands-on experience of working with data and converting it into insightful analysis and dashboards. You will work directly with customers and users, solving their most important challenges through data. Example projects include building a live dashboard for a FMCG company in Zambia, supporting a small construction company in Singapore, or working with a state government in India to improve their financial budgeting.

Data Science Intern: Our data science interns will work alongside our team of data scientists and economists to build algorithms and indices to map the world. Example projects include building a predictive model for malaria and measuring affluence at a 1 km grid by leveraging a variety of data sources — from the Census to satellite and spatial data. Interns are expected to be adept at R or Python.

Machine Learning Intern: If you have been learning about machine learning and deep neural networks, this internship will help you to put your learnings to work. Intern with our alternative data team to build data models and insight packs. Example projects include leveraging satellite imagery for road detection or using neural nets to improve efficiency of existing models.

Bonus: Here’s a resource on how to build your portfolio in data science.

Growth Marketing Intern: Have you been taking courses and reading all about digital marketing? This is the time to put all that knowledge to use. Join our Growth Team and learn all about marketing funnels, inbound marketing, and content. Example projects include optimizing the inbound funnel for a newly launched product or working with our Talent Team to help them run our next hiring campaign. Design ads, write content, work on social media campaigns, and learn how to use analytics to optimize marketing conversion — this internship will expose you to all aspects of growth marketing.

Business Development Intern: Are you an entrepreneur at heart who is always identifying problems and solving them? If you are passionate about building and scaling businesses, this internship is for you. Our business development team is looking for all rounders and hustlers — you can dive deep into a specific sector for market research, run lead generation campaigns, run high impact growth experiments and maybe even work directly with potential customers.

We’re hiring a limited number of interns whom we can entrust with important business problems. If, at the end of this blog, you are convinced to write your next internship story with SocialCops (of course, you’ll be writing a blog!), get going and apply soon. We process applications on a rolling basis, and so the earlier you apply, the better the chances you’ll get selected. Check out all our internships and apply here!

If you’re not sure about what role to apply to or think that you’d be a fit for multiple roles, go ahead and apply for the roles that you think you’d be a fit for, then mention in your application what you’re really hoping to achieve in the internship. We’ll work with you to figure out the right internship during the application process.

Looking for more information? Learn more about our internship application process.

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The blog was originally published on the SocialCops blog.