Page 45 - PPO Diaries

PPO Diaries

❖ what are the things to keep in mind in the internship?

• Develop a mindset to give the best of your best efforts during the 2 months. “Tujhe PPO mile ya naa
mile, ye do mahine tujhe koi nahin jeet saktaa!!!”.
It might not be what you know that matters during an internship, but it mostly would be your
readiness and pace in learning new things and applying in the project. This requires a lot of stamina
and dedication. Even if your plans are to look for a better company during the final placement,
complete the internship in the best way possible because this project is going to be your main
spokesperson during the final placements.
It is also possible that your dream recruiter might seek the opinion of your internship mentor before
taking a call on offering you a job or not. It is really a small world!
• This doesn’t essentially mean that you sit in front of your laptop for the 2 months. Join the parties
during your stint, develop networks, and make yourself familiar with all the employees around you.
Often, the interns are expected to get data and insights required for the project from the colleagues,
and this networking definitely comes to use in such instances.
• Develop a rapport with your seniors and super-seniors, and get to know the key areas of their
expertise. This would be one of the best disaster mitigation strategies. At a juncture during my
internship, where I was not finding a way ahead, it was a super-senior who came for my rescue.
• Don’t restrict yourself to the methodology provided to you by your mentor. Be enthusiastic to express
your thoughts/ideas during your internships. The company would be actually looking for fresh
perspectives and even appreciate your views which might be against the notion of your superiors
(obviously, express them in a diplomatic way).
• If you end up getting a project which seems impossible for you, communicate the same as soon as
possible, and seek for another project. There is nothing worse than attempting a project which is not
in sync with your skill-set and failing to deliver at the end or seeking a replacement after spending a
considerable amount of time on it.
• Most importantly, provide a periodic update to your mentor and ensure that your project is
propagating in alignment with his/her plan.

❖ What pre-internship preparation do you suggest for juniors?

• Excel in Excel to Excel!! : MS- Excel is the lifeline of any Operations Manager. Knowledge in excel is
mandatory for an internship in operations as the churning of data to generate the required insights
and output would be an inevitable part of almost all internships. It can be learned from YouTube
tutorials or a session from any trainer. Personally, the training session by Altaf Karimi was extremely
useful for dealing with excel during my internship.
• Operations Research: Optimization would be a key area in many of the Operations/Supply Chain
Internships. Pursuing a course on this subject before your internship would help to deal with such
projects with ease.
• Programming: It would be greatly advisable to familiarize with any of the coding platforms like R or
Python or Lingo. This would help in finishing many tasks swiftly which would demand tremendous
effort and time if attempted in Excel.

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