From struggle, comes success. Your struggles today will help you build the strength you need tomorrow. After failing to get a good MBA college despite 99.43 percentile in 2013, owing to my weak academic record, I somehow mustered the courage to appear for CAT again and got 99.86 percentile in 2014, the highest in my city. This helped me get into IIM Lucknow.The quest to find one’s dream internship starts right after joining college, competing with some of the brightest minds in the country.
My tryst with Colgate Palmolive started with an online aptitude test which had questions ranging from numerical, verbal, to logical concepts. The next round was group discussion where I pitched in several insightful ideas.
Moment of change
In the final interview, I was questioned on my strengths and weaknesses, my biggest achievement, my role model, and some situational questions. I was finally offered an internship with the company, and my answer to what the biggest achievement in my life was, changed at that very moment. My internship started in April; 22 of us from top notch MBA colleges of India were called to Mumbai for the induction. We were briefed about the company and our projects. I had to travel to Delhi the very next day to meet my mentor. My internship was in Lucknow and my project required me to travel to places such as Varanasi, Allahabad, Gorakhpur and Kanpur. In my two months of internship, I interacted with more than 20 salesmen, met 18 distributors and more than 1,000 shopkeepers, and travelled more than 5,000 kilometers. I also had to analyse a lot of real-time as well as past data. I never thought that I would be sitting in the corner of a road, talking to a salesman about his journey and other random things over a cup of tea in sweltering summer.
The internship taught me the nuances of marketing which is helping me in my second year of college. Marketing is hard to understand if you don’t interact with people at the ground level. All the bookish knowledge acquired would be of no use unless it is coupled with practical learning, and my company gave me a perfect platform for that. There were instances when my live experiences would contradict with what was taught to us in the class, but this is the beauty of marketing. When I see a product now, I am able to appreciate the latent hard work of thousands of people behind it who ensure that it reaches there. Never underestimate your power or give up on your dreams; they were given to you for a reason.
Ayush Jain is a second-year marketing student at IIM Lucknow. Courtesy: internshala.com