Internships have become mandatory in every student’s life - but, being an intern has not seen it’s full growth in all workplaces.
Here at Skcript, internships are valued and given equal importance as that of a full-time job. Being a program manager, handling 8 fully grown (physically) but still having the mentality of 10-year-olds was definitely difficult. To add to that, I even had half-a-dozen interns walking in! 😕 I had jitters and was passing them onto my CEO and CTO as well! Our biggest worry was finding enough chairs to fit them all in! Though we had a couch that occupied more than half the room space, we wanted to give the interns their private spots and make them feel comfortable. And that’s when our intern journey began…
Where it all started
For every seasonal break, Skcript offers internships - those which had different roles and different platforms to choose from, something that was not just a generalized role. But we never wanted to use their potential just to complete tasks or run errands like most internships tend to turn to out to be. Giving them a perspective into getting started with a career was the ultimate goal - but to find and filter out applicants who genuinely wanted hands-on work experience and not just a certificate to meet their requirements turned out to be a mammoth task for us. For that, our Marketing Head, Sankriti gets a dragon egg as a gift! She had to scan through too many applications and then had to call them up for a telephonic discussion. Now, when we have these telephonic discussions, we almost decide whom to bring on board and whom not to. Most of the times, applicants sounded bored and disinterested - so we exclude them and iterate till we find the right fit. This is where we also started trusting our instincts (the vibe you get from the applicant will help you decide if you can work with them or not) as taught by our CEO, for he gave us complete freedom in the interview process.
Preparations
All the talks were done, dates were set, banners were hung over our office walls. We had meetings, discussions, and a lot of gatherings to make sure that they had a place to sit and also we had place to mentor and assist them through their internship period. Stationery was bought. The welcome kit was packed and ready to be handed over. Reminder emails with the needed information were sent.
The day they walked in
The first to join the clan was Narayan , from IIT (our Machine Learning/AI Intern). After a week he was accompanied by Caroline (our Design Intern), a design student from NID. They were soon joined by Nikhil and Ram Kishore from VIT (they were our AI and Android Interns respectively). We had a packed office already when Srihari , from NIT (our Marketing Intern), decided to enter. Now comes the real war! 😅 Now, let’s get to know them a bit more.
The Family Tree
Narayan was self-contained when he joined. He loved sitting inside the AI room and will be super happy if left alone to code in the room with the lights turned off (I know! 🙄). It was like he goes into hibernation whenever he works. And his work didn’t just speak but it sang a song! He came up with this Sound classifier which is ah-mazing! 🤓 But whenever he came out of his hibernation mode, he spoke football, a common interest shared by him and our Sr. Mobile App developer, Dikson. And during the lunch times, when we watched TV (or to be precise, browsed through the channels and ended up watching nothing) he spoke on all general matters and had his interests in all fields. Want to know about deep learning? He is the perfect guy to ask!
Moving onto the next part of our clan, the small yet powerful dragon Caroline. She is what you call a silent soul with a loud voice. Here her designs spoke volumes. She took even the tiniest of details into notice and produced magic with her designs. To impress Hareessh (Skcript’s Head of Design) takes a lot of talent and he was far more than impressed with her work (You don’t know how great an achievement that is!). Her work on one of our product’s site showed her dedication. Her research goes deep and you could see that on her blog post , Design 101: How Designing is like making the perfect Biriyani. She gelled with the team really well and shared her thoughts when needed. She is like a mini-Daenerys, holding her power and slowly using them to win people with her design in the place of dragons. 🐉
Then comes the duo, Ram Kishore, and Nikhil. We call them ‘the duo’ because they’re from the same college. Let’s start with Kishore - An Android lover. If you want to get him all excited start talking about GDG or Google or Samsung. He loves tech and call him if you need a debate to talk about Android. And the cool part is, he worked on building a bot for Google assistant, which was kewl! And also on a secret project as the boys call it. Now, we still haven’t found what exactly the secret project is, but we know that they’re working on it 😏
And now the arena can welcome the smart Nikhil. We are grateful that he knew so much tech but we’re ungrateful(well, sort of) for introducing the concept of bitcoin to our bugging AI developer, Naveen. Thank you, Nikhil, for making Naveen become obsessed with bitcoins and torture the life out of us every day with the rate! 🙄 He liked the vintage stuff and had this mechanical keyboard. It was so cooool! From what he shared, the clicking noise produced while typing is good to the ears and you can type as long as you wart without feeling any stress on your fingers. You can feel what you type rather than see (The keyboard company probably owes me commission now for branding them 😋). Our Developers had a lot to learn from him and he shared his knowledge with them without any hint of pride. His work , Transfer Learning on Image recognition, was brilliant. The addition of Nikhil and Narayan doubled the strength of our AI team.
Now that we have seen all our interns, let’s move on to… Oh! wait. I missed out the youngest and the notorious of all. Srihari! We took the shortest time to make the decision to hire him - we had a phone discussion, came up with a task for him, called him for an interview and the next day he was on board! Our first impression of him was that of a reserved and self-contained boy. This image was shattered the moment he stepped out and opened his chatter-box mouth! The bond he and our Sr. Frontend developer, Praveen Juge, shared was pure love. Being a marketing intern he entertained Skcript’s website with his words. To be called good at content by our Head of Marketing, Sankriti was yet another achievement for him. But all of this will look small when food comes into the picture! Thanks to this boy and his bottomless stomach, we now own credits for finding the successor to ‘ Parotta Suri ’. His initiative to start the series ‘Meet the Nerd’ again was a hit and has its episodes lined up for released.
To expand from a clan of 9 to a clan of 14 was fearful. Managing all their tasks and seeing to that they learned something useful is not an easy job. But when people could manage their own tasks and follow through with them so well, especially at such a young age is a blessing. We believe that having a strong team pushes us to reach new heights everyday and this batch of interns taught us exactly that.
This post will be followed by the “Intern Series” - where our Summer of ‘17 Interns will talk about their life at Skcript, what they worked on and how a day at Skcript unfolds. Stay tuned for this series! 😉