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Summers v/s other internships in management schools

Summers

It’s a gateway to the final placements, a trend-setter, a window to what the future might hold. Summer placement is believed to be as and some times even more important than the final placements to the institutes as well as the recruiters.

Most of the institutes follow the traditional internships during the summer vacations. But there are few who do it a little differently. Pagalguy tried to find out what is the process of autumn or winter internships, what is the difference in the projects offered and a counter view as to why there are others who have switched back to the conventional summer internships.

Students’ take on autumn/winter internships

The process of autumn internship has been consciously planned at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai (SPJIMR) because of the compulsory project work the students have to do during summer. These projects are with NGOs working at the grassroots level. The students are expected to give managerial inputs and help to come up with solutions for the problems these NGOs face during the two months they work there. For the students from SPJIMR, the industry interaction happens in their second year during October and November.

The philosophy behind working with an NGO is for social exposure and confrontation with the bottom of the pyramid, says Rajesh Balakrishnan, a second year student from the institute, who interned at the Chinmaya Organisation for Rural Development, Dharamshala.

Sharing his observation, another student adds, We have been getting the same recruiters as have the other top management institutes in the country. They might be offering lesser number of projects but being a smaller batch (180 seats) and with lesser number of institutes competing for projects during that time, we have been able to continue with the process with competent internships as well as final placements. Even though, we do not spend the summers in industry interaction, the autumn internship takes care of that.

From the batch of 2011, which sat for autumn project placement in August 2010, there were 218 offers made for 178 participants from SPJIMR. The 43 companies that participated included Ernst & Young, KPMG, Miebach Consulting, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Reckitt Benckiser, P&G;, HUL, Nestle, Intel, Citibank, Accenture, Development Bank of Singapore, Schlumberger and Capgemini among others.

In NITIE, Mumbai, although there is the regular process of summer internship, the students spend the last four months of their course doing a winter internship. The winter internship for the second year students happens after the process of final placements is completed in January.

But, with the last four months of the course spent in companies, don’t the students miss out on the required academic input? Aditi Vajpeyee, a member of the student placement committee at NITIE says, The rest of the year is planned keeping these last four months in mind. Experience of working in the industry, for four months works as an added advantage for the students of NITIE as it reduces the gap between theory and practice.

Adding to that, another student from the institute, Somjit Basu says, Like many other b-schools we too have to achieve 160 credits to complete our course. These include 4 credits for each course, 4 credits for summer internship and 16 credits for winter internship. Personally, when I was evaluating my options, I had compared NITIE to several other institutes and realised that the subjects covered are the same. Other institutes might offer more electives.

The scope for autumn / winter internships compared to summer internships

The most common reason cited by the institutes for not offering the traditional summer internships is that, the students are better prepared for the industry when they go out for internships after completing more than a year of their course.

Senior faculty of SPJIMR, Professor Parimal Merchant, believes, In other institutes the students go for internships after the first year, selection for which happens in November or December. At that point in time, a student is hardly six months into the course, which means that the internships they get are not on the basis of what they have learnt in the institute but on the basis of their previous academic or work experience. Here, students go for internships after almost 1 12 years into the course. By then they have chosen their specializations and are better suited for the industry.

But is there a difference in the kind of projects that are offered during the summer and winter internships? Since NITIE offers both, summer placement for first-year students and winter internship for second-year students, Aditi explains, Since the students sitting for summer placements are just six months into the course, the projects that are offered are very basic and do not need any specific skill set. The projects that are offered during the winter are for the students who have completed a majority of their course, thus the roles and responsibility offered are much larger.

In most of the cases the students get a chance of interning in the same company where they have been placed. In case the company does not offer a winter internship, which is only about 20 per cent of the batch, the students look for other options.

Elaborating on the kinds of internship projects that they get during the winters, Somjit says, Since most of the internships are with companies that have already extended the final placement offer, students get to work on live projects. In our senior batch there was a student who, during his winter internship was asked to set up a food processing unit in Africa for Olam International, a Singapore based supply chain management company. There was another student who worked on the final feasibility report for ITC’s new business.

Institutes put a lot of effort in summers hoping that they will convert it into PPOs. It is believed that because of the reasons discussed above, the industry becomes more open to give Pre-Placement Offers (PPOs) to those who have interned with them during the winter / autumn, especially because it is so close to the final placement season.

Counter View

Though there are some who continue with an alternate process of internship, there are others who counter the alternate process and have switched back to summer placements. The reasons most commonly cited are that longer internships usually tend to make students waste a lot of their time, they do not add much of a value, the quality of internships offered during summers are better and that, the students lose out on time meant for academic input.

Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSOM) had a six month long internship. Only from the batch of 2011 has the institute switched to a two-month summer internship. The faculty in-charge of placements, Prithwis Mukerjee says, Over the years we realised that the six months of projects were not really adding enough value to the students in a two-year course. Many a time, the projects were not able to keep them busy for the entire six months and students were whiling away their time. Instead with the change in the internship process and the reduced time bracket, we have been able to increase the number of courses offered and are able to give a richer educational input to our students.

To the institute’s surprise, the shift has brought in better projects and more recruiters. Sidharth Mishra, a student from VGSOM says, Though the institute had been following this kind of placements for a long time, they realised that in recent times, the institute was missing out on a lot of opportunities. The shift to a two-month summer recruitment process has brought 21 first-time recruiters on campus of the 54 companies that participated in the summer placement process.

The possibility of a PPO would be greater in the scenario where the student has spent a considerable part of their course working for the company. Will that not be a loss for the institute, to which professor Mukerjee says, Definitely the possibility of a PPO is higher after a longer internship, but we have also realised that a PPO binds the students and does not give them an opportunity to explore. Though there might be a fall in the number of PPOs, the subsequent increase in the number of recruiters and offers will cover up the gap.

IIM-Shillong in its first year had opted for an autumn internship rather than the conventional summer internship. The reason of doing so was in accordance with how all the other academic institutes work in the region. With extreme weather in winter, all the institutes and schools stay closed during the winters rather than the summers. We tried to convert this barrier into an opportunity and explored the possibility of autumn internships. But in the first year itself we realised that it was not that big an opportunity as we had expected it to be said the dean of IIM-Shillong, Professor D K Agarwal.

The institute, from the consequent year onwards decided to adopt the traditional process of summer placement. Since the recruitment process happens in the winter time, the institute has also kept a provision to facilitate the recruiters by moving the process to Calcutta, if need be.

The expectations of the institute, like any other IIM, were very high from the summer internship process. The quality of projects that were coming in were not adding value to the students. We realised that there was a huge gap in the kind of projects that were being offered in other institutes during the summers and what we got during autumn. It is also the last quarter of the year and the companies have higher priorities like meeting sales targets and so on. Since we did not want to compromise on the quality of projects, we switched back to summer internship he adds.

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