Internships

It is the internships-and-placements season in college. The students who have just entered the third year have to take tests for getting into an internship program (which would take place after a year). This is the time when all of the pressure, which we often see in the movies that depict life in an Engineering college, starts to build up. Now if you think about it for a minute, did that second sentence even make much sense? What is the hurry of taking those tests and interviews? Even if you get selected (which obviously does not happen to 99% of the population), you ultimately have to wait for a year to start with the training. But it seems like, the companies love to see the students under that pressure.

The internships are mostly divided into two or three parts, depending upon the branch of engineering which you are pursuing. So, there is one for Computer Science and related circuit branches (the one for me), the other is for mechanical and civil engineering branches, and the last one for biotechnology and chemical engineering branches. For the ease of those among us who never have any idea as to what companies are coming to the college for recruitment and when their tests are conducted (this is 95% of us, by the way), our college has gone through the struggle of making WhatsApp groups branch-wise. This is done so that they can post the internship details for various companies in that group. We can give this one to them (even though they hire some of us to do so) because this is the only helpful thing they do during the whole process.

Let me talk a bit about the mindset and routine of students going through this. So, suddenly everyone, who did not even think about all this stuff a month back, is under the stress of getting into a good internship program. I'll talk about the students of Computer Science and related circuit branches here. All of us, who did not even like coding have to code because all those companies which are hiring, have their first assessment round as the coding round. This means that even if you can do great at the rounds ahead and even if you can learn to code and stuff after getting into the program, you don't really stand a chance because you won't even get past the first round. Because of this particular reason, the sales of online platforms providing coding courses hikes at this time. Everyone has to complete this course as soon as possible because the more time they take, the more opportunities are lost. I wish I could say that it is guaranteed that they'll get into a decent company, once they complete that course. Clearly, that is not the case. To add up to this pressure, the colleges can't get enough of the assignments. It has certainly started to feel like making us solve 4-5 assignments every week, gives them a different level of satisfaction. But that is not it because then you realize that the mid-semester examinations are coming up and you got to study for that too. All of a sudden, this lockdown doesn't seem to resemble the one that we started off with.

All of us are fighting the same battle at this time but still, everyone has their own to win. We have to continue to thrive through all this competition, keeping in mind that we are not the only ones. This might help us spend more time getting things done than ranting about all of them (just like I've been doing). I wish all of you reading this all the very best and I hope that all of us can accomplish our goals (while trying to meet the deadlines for the college assignments). Now, I better go get done with my assignments and probably you should too (XP).