Internera - Siddharth Surana

 

Hey! This is Siddharth Surana, currently pursuing my 3rd-year undergraduate degree in chemical engineering. I reside in Nagpur, Maharashtra. I have always been attracted to the product development field and wanted a hands-on experience. At last, I got this opportunity from Gupshup in summer 2021. In second-year summers, I searched for different profiles. Being from an operations background, I learned more about the execution part and team building. Due to the online nature of the internship in summer 2021, I could complete two internships, one at Gupshup and the other at Dusminute. Profile at Dusminute was that of a strategy intern. We will go through my journey of the internship at Gupshup in brief!

From the freshie year, I explored different sectors and profiles to get hands-on experience and get some industrial connections for the future. The internship in freshie year was more in business development profile, and it was a good experience. I wanted to explore the product segment where you can interact with the product development team and improve it from the basic functionality to benefit the end-user. In the Product Management profile, you need to understand the functioning of your product and have a deep understanding of some collaborative applications such as the miro board, slack, and Gsuite.

I got to know about the product management intern at Gupshup via the Internship blog, and the procedure of selection and duration was provided on the blog itself. The selection process at Gupshup was pretty simple and interactive. We had two rounds of interviews. Before that, there was a resume shortlisting based on one’s experience and academics. In the two rounds of interviews, the first one is held by the respective manager or director you are supposed to report to, and the HR team takes the other one. The questions in the interview rounds followed a small case study type format. They wanted to know about your overall knowledge in the product management sector, what one knows about this field and how it serves the ultimate goal of satisfying the end-user. Most of the questions could be answered by instinct and a not-so-detailed knowledge of product management.

My internship was two months long, and I was asked to focus my attention on the non-coding AI bot, one of the prime segments in Gupshup. I basically worked on making different flow diagrams for the non-coding bot in different sectors such as Hospitality, Healthcare, and Banking. I played a significant role in finalizing the flow of the chatbot with a competitive market analysis.

Some of the key takeaways from my product internship: you have to get the product right, and even after launching your product, there are still many phases where you will be required to make changes that you feel are the best in the interest of the company. This gives an insight into how continuous process improvement takes place. You will get this habit of understanding the problem and looking for solutions. You will check if the solutions are viable economically and in terms of usability. Getting the solutions correct with these limitations is a cumbersome process and takes time. Effective time management is something you will learn from this internship. Through case studies in open group discussions, I also learned to work in a group and come up with innovative ideas to tackle the same problem statement.

I started approaching companies in the operations and product management profile via LinkedIn apping. I made a list of companies in the electric vehicle domain as I had some previous experience in the same domain and my PoR in IITB racing aligned me to get more chances in the same sector. 

I would like to say one thing to all the sophies out there looking for internships- Try to get hands-on experience. I have seen my colleagues getting internships, but they could not get the experience they expected. Startups or MSME companies are the best to approach to get the best experience. If you did not get an opportunity to intern by any chance, don’t be sad or doubt your ability. Use the two months summer break to explore different tools like python, AI/ML. If interested in the consulting sector, try to solve as many study cases as possible. For data analytics, try learning different tools like power bi, tableau, power query, etc. If anyone is interested in the core field, they can approach respective professors for a summer research intern and try their luck there. You also get many free subscriptions in the summer period, so you can complete as many courses as you want and brush up your skills for the 3rd-year summer intern.

That’s all from my side. I know it has been a bit lengthy. I hope you guys get good insights from this. Also, if you have any doubts regarding any points above or otherwise, feel free to approach me. I will try to resolve it to the best of my abilities.

Thanks !!!!!!