IIM Ahmedabad convocation. Express photo Javed Raja (archive)
While most management students take up internships in corporate sectors to brush up their skills, the trend seems to change as this year, the students of the IIM Ahmedabad have joined newly born start-ups, social sectors et al to experience challenges these sectors provide. These institutions have given a rich experience to the students.
Swapnil Chauhan, a student of IIM-A, joined the project ‘Internet Sathi’ which is a joint venture by Google and Tata Trusts to address the huge gender gap in the digital literacy in rural India. Chauhan also worked on projects and validated various project proposals. “Having complete ownership of the project, I performed extensive research and analysis by building financial models, carrying out field visits to villages of different states of the country and deliberating with the top leadership of various stakeholders like equipment manufacturers, financial institutions, implementation partners, technology vendors and training content developers,” he said.
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Similarly, Akansha Verma joined Impact Consulting (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and got a scope to do extensive research and met with multiple stakeholders to review practices around evidence-based accountability. “My role was to devise a strategy, for identifying the synergies and overcoming the gaps that exist among the multiple internal, partner, state and central government dashboards that are being used for tracking outcomes and decision-making — primarily in UP and Bihar,” said she. The internship helped her understand the issues in monitoring, outcome tracking and decision-making in the healthcare and social sector.
For Akshaya Ganesh, an internship with the Industries Department in the Government of Telangana, was a satisfactory experience. She was assigned a series of mini projects that were diverse with respect to the nature of work. She handled many projects which included ideation, content generation and design of the first edition of the Industries newsletter which was to be circulated across the state, evaluation of a PPP project, and creation of an investment pitch to attract investments in the MSME sector of the state.