The internship was a steep learning curve

I did my internship at Edelweiss Financial Services in the Life Insurance Business (ETLI). The first two days had presentations by various business heads explaining their work after which we were allocated our projects. The culture at ETLI was like a startup and that encouraged dynamic and fast paced work .Ideas and criticisms were always encouraged in the team. The goals of the projects given to interns were defined but how to accomplish it was left to us. We were thrown in the deep end of the pool and we had to quickly learn how to swim. We could take the help of anyone in the office and initiative taking was highly encouraged.

Summer Internship is supposed to be a platform where we get to apply the skillset we learnt in our MBA first year and I was glad to find that it was true .My project in the Risk Management team involved using a lot of Finance and Quantitative concepts which we learnt in the first year at IIM Indore.

One of the most important things that we learnt in our first year is that we should always keep in mind how our work is aligned with the company’s objectives. Sometimes we become so engrossed in our projects and work that we tend to forget what the actual goal is. I made a conscious effort to understand how my work fit into the bigger scheme of things. I worked accordingly, always taking a step back to ensure that my work was in line with the end objective. Another extremely relevant skill that I applied was the Organizational Behaviour one which proved to extremely useful in understanding the team dynamics and facilitating team work. The internship was a steep learning curve and it was very useful in understanding the kind of work we are expected to do once we step out in the corporate world.

• Jatin Gupta, PGP2 Student.