Have you also worked relentlessly for getting an internship during your graduation? Everyone goes through this phase, where we want to put our skills to test and apply our knowledge in this working world. Internships are one of the significant experiences during your graduation period. They carry a lot of impact on your resume and help you to understand how things work in a professional world when compared to merely doing assignments during your graduation.

SELECTION PROCESS

My journey of getting an internship started at the end of my sixth semester when companies were visiting our campus for accepting interns.
I got selected as an intern at NTT DATA, Tokyo, Japan, for six weeks. After the announcement of the results, I was overwhelmed with happiness and couldn't express my emotions. It was a very proud moment for me as I had bagged my first internship at such a big organization, and being in Tokyo was the icing on the cake.
The process for selection comprised of three rounds -

• First-round was an MCQ based aptitude and coding test which included verbal, logical reasoning, quantitative and C, C++ based questions.
• The second round was a technical interview which comprised of in-depth questions based on projects, technologies, situations & a logical problem at the end.
• The final round was a technical + hr interview with the Japanese team which comprised of questions based on projects, internship specific roles, technologies, and overall personality.

EXPERIENCE IN JAPAN

It was a life-changing experience for me from Day 1 of the internship.
The people in Japan were friendly, cooperative, and kind. The language was not a quite barrier as I got used to it after some days and thanks to Google translate. I was amazed by the seamless trains in Japan, which were always on time, and traveling was never too exhaustive as it had been earlier. The infrastructure and the skyscrapers were bliss to watch with automation all around the place. The environment of my office was also amicable where all the co-workers would sit at the same workplace right from the managers to the support people. They would also have lunch together and shared a great bond among themselves. I was made to feel very comfortable from the first day itself with a Welcome party, which helped me to get socialized with my team. My team was very supportive in all aspects, and whenever I had any problem, I could directly approach them. I was assigned daily tasks and had meetings that kept track of my status.

The work which was assigned to me was exciting, and it was aligned with my interests. It comprised of Capacity planning, Time Series Forecasting & Anomaly Detection of CPU Usage, web access logs of multiple servers (Application & Database) with more than millions of data records and file sizes in GBs!. I got to work on cutting-edge tools & technologies like Prophet (Machine Learning), Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash), InfluxDB, Grafana. Everything was planned with perfection, and it was made sure that all the schedules are met. Apart from work, we also had an intercultural exchange program with the elementary school kids, which helped to interact with them and get to know more about the Japanese culture & traditions. The accommodation provided to me was also perfect, and the company took care of most of the things.

It is a tough country for vegetarians because there are very fewer restaurants which provide veg food. Besides, you must be very careful in respect of specifying veg stuff as there is always a probability of some non-veg mixing. Being a vegetarian, it was difficult for me, so I had carried some ready to cook food and learned to cook, which helped me to survive there. Also living alone in a foreign country helped me to understand the importance of becoming independent and managing all the tasks.

CONCLUSION

Overall the internship helped me grow personally, sharpened my skills, and provided immense experience in almost all the aspects. I also gained a new sense of professionalism and a clear vision of being in an enterprise world.

Finally, I would like to advise people to grab the opportunities through all the possible means and do an internship irrespective of your field. There is a lot to gain both on a personal and professional scale. Keep working hard towards your goals, and one day, your time will surely come.