Summer of 2014. Ten of the most precious and enjoyable weeks
of my life. Two and a half months that changed me from an average guy, with
little experience in public transport and habituated to the comfort of
air-conditioned rooms and cars, to someone who can get by on his own in a
completely alien city. Ten weeks that saw me make new friends, explore places
and spend time in a corporate world that would soon become my second home. A
summer spent as much in learning as it was spent in having fun, spent as much
in making new bonds as renewing existing ones. A summer almost wholly spent
interning at Samsung Research Institute, Bangalore (or SRI-B, as we call it).

The selection process was relatively simple, and happened
very early – in the first month of my fifth semester. Interested students were
asked to submit resumes, but no shortlisting was done based on this, and it all
came down to a small MCQ test on basic C programming. There was some
nervousness as I fancied my chances of getting selected, but the tension soon
passed as, after a small talk about Samsung, the list of selected candidates
was announced. The wait was over, and I had an internship!

The internship began on May 15th, a mere week after the end
of my third year. During this one week, apart from packing, I used to think a
lot about how I would spend my time in Bangalore. The last time I had been
there was when I was a small kid. I had absolutely no memories of the city and
knew nothing about living there, except for the hype that Bangalore natives
among my classmates had generated. There were 8 of us interning at SRI-B from
IIT Madras. I wondered if I would make new friends. I wondered if I would make
my mark in the corporate world. I wondered if it would become a memory to
cherish, or one that I’d speedily forget and never wish to remember again.
Fortunately for me, it was the former.

I was travelling to another city for ten weeks, and my
excitement level was high. I was never alone, because two of my closest friends
interned in the same city – and over the next ten weeks, I met a few other
people who became my best friends over the ten weeks we spent together.

SRI-B hosted us in a wonderful hotel for a week before we
moved to our PGs. That week was amazing and went by in a flash. From a chance meeting
paving the way for new friendships, to a DJ night where we danced till we
dropped, to an exciting induction seminar (well, except for the bits in the end
where they explained the rules), I was pretty happy with my first week in
Bangalore. Any cribs? Not really.

My first weekend in Bangalore was spent PG hunting, which
was quite an experience! If you are a male looking for a decent PG in the
Marathahalli area of Bangalore, I’d recommend you conduct some research and
make a few phone calls. We saw some 10-15 PGs on the first day, walked a good
6-7 km before we finally settled on one that was downright uncomfortable but
made up for it with its proximity to shops and the main road. For the girls,
the process was apparently simpler as the number of girls who were interning at
SRI-B was much smaller (sigh!).

I won’t go into the details of the technical aspects of my
internship, partly because I don’t want to bore the non-Computer Science
readers, and partly because I must not. Everyone learns during interns. It is
what you do apart from learning that is interesting, isn’t it? The office space
at SRI-B was really stimulating at a creative level. The first thing I noticed
about the workspaces in the office was the absence of cubicles. Before this, I
had seen only my dad’s office, and had mentally expected a closed corner
cubicle when I was told that the Director of the Advanced Research Team – to
which I was assigned – was also working on the same floor as me. However, there
were no doors on my floor, save for a few meetings rooms. It also had a
cafeteria, which provided coffee, tea, soft drinks and of course water, all for
free. I remember asking the cafeteria guy the price of a bottle of Coke, and
then asking him again a second time because I did not believe that it was free.

The employees at SRI-B were also really friendly. Each
intern is assigned a representative in the HR department who will essentially
be their guide for the full duration of their internship. That is another thing
that I liked about SRI-B. It is organized to a fault. Anything you need? You
just need to raise a request in their internal workflow and it gets delivered
to your workspace. The FTEs, i.e Full Time Employees, in my team were really
friendly and helped me get settled down in office. I could talk to them freely
(strictly on a first name basis, mind you) and ask them any queries I had –
technical, non-technical or just questions about the city. I used to ‘pain’
them every Friday by asking them to suggest some place to go to during the
weekend. My mentor, despite being a busy man (he was the Director of ART), was
very approachable and sometimes even responded to my queries over the internal
chat engine, which I found rather strange in the beginning, but soon got
accustomed to.

Lunch at Samsung is free, and so is dinner, provided you
stay till then. And the food is really amazing – at least, much better than the
food in our PG or in insti messes. My friends and I used to eat together
everyday, and lunch breaks frequently stretched to 2 hours, from 12 to 2.
Samsung also has this ritual of team lunches once in a month, to enable the
team to spend a light moment together and take a step back from professional
pressures.

So that’s about the office. What about the city? The real
fun was during the weekends, when we generally roamed around, going to malls
and other places of attraction. Bangalore offers enough and more to keep you
occupied for 8 weeks – Bannerghatta Zoo, Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, a large
number of malls (Phoenix and Orion are the most famous) and the finger-licking,
mouth-wateringly good MTR restaurant. We visited the Visveshwarayya Museum and
Shivasamudram falls near Mysore. In short, we had a lot of fun.

This post is already too long, so I will stop here. The
intern has definitely affected me positively. I can sense something different
in me – the way I interact with others, my outlook towards life and my
worldview in general. And the Pre Placement Offer that was extended to me by
SRI-B has given a boost to my self-confidence. Truly, the summer of 2014 is not
one that I will want to forget in a hurry.

About the author: Friendly and fun-loving, Ganesh is a final
year B. Tech student.  When not talking
and laughing or generally fooling around with his friends, you can find him
thinking about deep and totally useless things. He’s a huge fan of CSK, MSD and
now, Chennaiyin FC!

This story was first published on the IIT Madras student
blog ‘The Fifth Estate‘.