An Outlet - Part 9

10th April, 2023 - Summer Internship Begins

Guess where I am now?

I'm in an entirely new city where I'll be spending the next two months working with one of the biggest investment banking companies in the world. I feel extremely blessed and excited for this journey!

I came here yesterday evening. Last week, I had a dilemma on whether I should ask my dad to accompany me. This is because my firm is providing us accomodation for the first week but then we're on our own. And I hadn't found (or worked hard on finding) any place for me to stay post this week. But, with Kristen's help, I was able to convince myself that I can figure this out on my own.

Oh oh oh! Speaking of Kristen, thanks to our internships, we'll be spending the next two months in the same cityyyyyyyyy!!! Yasssssss!!! Since our offices are not so close we can't stay together but you bet we're hitting each other up whenever we get the time to!

Anyway, after a pretty long drive I had reached my lavish hotel, got settled in, met up with my college mates, had some absolutely delicious dinner post which I had tried to go off to sleep so I could wake up on time today.

My initial idea of "waking up on time" was to wake up for breakfast but that didn't happen. Something tells me that, unfortunately, this hotel's lovely breakfast isn't reaching me🙃

So I woke up and got ready in me formals for my first day of internship. There was a bus outside the hotel to take us to office. The office is huge, by the way. It's got a nice drive way, 3 big glass buildings, a big garden with swings and a walking lane, one big main indoor cafeteria and a relatively smaller outer one (majorly for seating). Oh, they've got a small Starbucks set up too.

We were first left into the basement where they handed out our ID cards and then took us through the green courtyards into a huge auditorium. A bunch of onboarding sessions started thereafter, starting with offer letter distribution moving into remote working and other tech related knowledge transfer.

At one point, "Pick up teams" started pouring in to "pick up" interns from their departments. I recognised one of them from the interviews back at college. The other one was quite good looking, definitely eye candy material. Anyways, that's where I met the other interns who I'd be "competing with" in this internship.

Meet AJ, Patrick, Priscilla,
Sadie (who is from my institute but we've never spoken) and Simon. Bunch of decent looking chaps.

The pick up team members are a part of their department's intern working group with one of them being my direct manager for the internship. She gave us an overview of the floor and introduced us to whoever was present at the time. I don't remember any of the names now. And turns out there are more people left to be introduced to, majority of them in fact. Great.

We had an introductory session and a department overview session which was full of jargon. It's definitely going to take some adjusting to.

They told us about the structure of the internship - 1 week induction -> 3 week pod 1 -> mid review -> 3 week pod 2 -> final presentation

This is definitely different than what I had heard but that's okay, it doesn't really change much for me.

After our time at the floor, we continued with some more general onboarding sessions at the auditorium. There was one on values and an ice breaking session too. Met a lot of other interns along the way. Hopefully, I'll be able to talk to them more within the next two months and also maybe make a good friend out of them? Or is it too much to ask?

This firm has got an app for food and travel each. Let me tell you how each of them works.

For food, there are around 14-15 different counters selling different kinds of food: Oriental, Continental, kebab+daal, North Indian, South Indian, Biryani, Pizza, Fruits and Sandwich, Mexican, Beverages, Salad, Ice cream and 2 ad hoc Desert/Snack bars. There's an app through which you can select any of these counters, select from the food options available (which change every day) and pay through the app itself.

Once that is done, you get a QR code. Each (physical) counter has a QR scanner at the front. You scan the QR, the order appears in front of their screen and they prepare that order and serve it to you.

Up until last year, everything was free but starting this year..... On the plus side, the food is really delish!

They also have grab and go installations at different points in the office where they stock juices, milkshakes, cakes, pastries and a range of snack items for people to pick up, scan, pay and go. It's pretty cool tbh.

For travel, they've got an extensive cab service. They had us all register our home locations as well as our "pick up and drop" spots. Through the app, we need to choose our log in/log out time (3 hours and 1 hour prior accordingly) and they'll assign us a mini van or cab. All vehicles leave on an hourly basis. Thankfully, there's no charge for this service.

I think these are 2 robust systems and apt for such a big organisation.

Before leaving office, I took Sadie's help to get multiple pictures clicked at some places within the office premises, in order to get a good one to upload on LinkedIn.

After having an amaze dinner at the hotel, I am now getting ready to head off to bed for another exciting day at work.

If I haven't said this before, let me say it now. I'm super super grateful for this opportunity and will try to take in as much as I can as well as give back as much as I can.