Internship Experience at Piramal Group

 

- Anvay Varekar
(4th year, Chemical Engineering)

INTRODUCTION & MOTIVATION

My first exposure to the field of analytics was an online course I did in the December of my second year ( Python for Data Analytics and Machine Learning - Jose Pourtilla). It was a great course with lots of hands on work and I recommend it to a lot of people. I spent some time exploring Kaggle for the rest of the year.

I started looking for an intern in this field partly because of interest and partly because it was one of the few marketable skills I had.

PRE–INTERNSHIP PHASE & PREPARATION

I secured an internship in Bombay Stock Exchange in the second year summer through LinkedIn and worked in the Data Analytics Department there. BSE had a lot of data generated every second and I got to learn a lot about Big Data Analytics, especially the infrastructure used in the state-of-the-art systems and frameworks like Hadoop, PySpark and Impala.

I did a few additional courses including one on web scraping with beautiful soup and Selenium, GUI Automation with python and one about MS Excel. These along with my internship at BSE were discussed in my interview of my third year intern.

SELECTION PROCEDURE & INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE

For Piramal Analytics, there was an aptitude test initially. People were shortlisted for an in-person test in an LH. I initially did not know what to expect but it turned out to be a test based on data manipulation, using basic pandas functions. It was open and you could search online but the time limit required you to have a good grasp of the library to complete the questions in time.

On the basis of this test, people were shortlisted for interviews. Mine lasted for around 30-40 minutes. The panel consisted of an Analytics Manager and two people from HR. They asked me a few questions about myself followed by asking me to walk me through my resume. The main points they were interested in were my second year intern and my MS Excel knowledge and how I'd used that in my PoR. They were interested in all the points in my resume even if they weren't technical but the questions focused on these.

I was asked in-depth questions about my intern, about big data analytics and about K-Means Clustering which was the main project of my intern. After this and apart from the other parts in my resume, they asked me a brainteaser which I made significant progress on, but could not solve. They moved on to questions like why do you want to work here and others before wrapping up the interview.

I got to know about the selections the next day. I was excited about working at the Piramal Campus in Kurla, but that didn't happen.

Looking back at my intern, the remote communication and data restrictions made a lot of difference and some problems, but I'll focus on the work and what I got to learn.

WORK EXPERIENCE

My project was based on Time Series Analysis and to forecast the customer sales for the Piramal Pharma business. I worked with Python and various models like ARIMA, RFRs, Recurrent Neural Nets, Holt Winters etc. The data I had access to was very limited as I was working on a personal computer, but I got a great opportunity to learn about this field while working on real world data.

All the best