How did I land up an internship at IIM Tiruchirappalli? -By Saurabh Bhandari from PCET NMIET Pune

At the beginning of my fifth semester, I decided to explore management related internship opportunities, and doing an internship at any of the IIMs seemed like the best option. I drafted a cover letter expressing my interest in management along with an attached resume. I sorted out professors from IIM Kozhikode, Tiruchirappalli, and Lucknow based on the field I wanted to work in and mailed them in early October. It is essential to draft a cover letter that speaks strongly about your interests and how you’ve worked towards them. 

Selection process

The time it takes to get a response is unpredictable and hence it’s necessary to be patient here and send follow-up emails accordingly - one of the responses I received was just a week later whereas I received a few other responses 3 to 4 weeks after sending the first email. Telephonic interviews were conducted by a few professors to further assess my interests and competence. However, the professor I interned under had directly accepted my application after which administrative formalities were completed. The most crucial aspect of the application would be the cover letter - The cover letter must be personalized for every professor by taking interest in and reading about his/her projects and research papers and mentioning them in the mail accordingly.

The particulars of the project 

My project was based on “Integrated Management System (IMS) implementation in Indian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)”. To begin with, I had to obtain data from various proprietary databases like - reports of IMS firms, etc. Then, I had to analyze the data which was an onerous task as it involved a lot of reading and researching to determine underlying trends. 

Next was the development of hypotheses for which I spent a considerable amount of time learning how to extract the ‘not so obvious’ implications of data (to do so, I had to read several books related to management). Finally with all hypotheses developed and inferences obtained, I prepared a report and a presentation highlighting my findings and conclusions.

I had weekly reviews of progress where I was assessed and scrutinized about the work I’d done in the past week. Presumably, they were nerve-wracking and the first one I had was definitely an eye-opener. 

Having felt that I’d done more than what was expected going into my first-week review, I was taken aback when the professor told me that he could get the same amount of work done in an hour. The professor guided me on how to do the work instead of the technicalities and my next few days were spent learning how to work instead of analyzing data and developing hypotheses. This was one of the biggest takeaways from my internship experience at IIM Tiruchirappalli!