'Live' projects draw Ivy interns

B-SCHOOL: Foreign internships have become an important recruiting channel for many Indian firms.

The list of students from top Ivy League colleges wanting to do internships in top Indian companies is growing at a scorching pace. Take Infosys, for example.

The company's InStep internship program has seen a sharp increase in applications in the last few years: from 300 in 2000 to 12,000 in 2006.

So only those with a cumulative grade-point average of 3.6 or more make it to a short list, and then they are put through two rounds of interviews. The final 100, who cut a wide academic swathe from engineering schools like MIT and Carnegie Mellon to business schools like Stanford, Wharton and Kellogg, work in areas from marketing to technology.

But infotech companies are not the only ones drawing talent. For example, Mahindra & Mahindra, the Tata Group, Biocon are also among the top companies on the foreign interns' priority list.

So what has made India a top draw among foreign interns? The growth story is one reason.

The other reason "� a more compelling one "� is unlike their counterparts in many other countries, foreign interns in India are not made to work on dummies created for greenhorns but get an opportunity to work on high-quality, customer-facing projects that actually help the firm.

The interns from top global schools want meaty projects and take pride in knowing millions of users will benefit from his work.

A few years ago, Amit Dixit, a Stanford Business School intern, helped Mahindra & Mahindra set up Automart India, the company's used vehicles' website on the Internet. After Dixit left to join Harvard, his place was taken by Nikhil Raghavan "� also from Stanford. The hugely successful website is now a learning zone not only for the foreign interns but also for young M&M executives.

Rajeev Dubey, President, HR & Corporate Services of M&M, says M&M has continued its tradition of giving projects based on business needs and requirements and hence all projects are live projects.

Infosys, for example, allows its interns to work on real projects and practices that range from application development to business consulting, in practices that include marketing, corporate planning, education & research, enterprise solutions and software engineering & technology laboratories (SETLabs).

These are projects that represent and impact the Infosys core practices. Interns have been part of various groups that have worked on high-end projects and some of them have even authored papers on their work at Infosys and their papers have been accepted by internationally reputed journals. The interns sign confidentiality agreements and are treated very much like employees.

The effort is worth it, says Sanjay Purohit, associate VP & head of corporate planning, Infosys. The objective is to gain a mindshare of students from top colleges, as they will be the clients, employees, competitors or even the leaders of tomorrow. M&M's Dubey says the internship programmes help globalize the M&M culture and brings in out of box thinking.

At the same time, companies are increasingly seeing internship programs as crucial for finding future talent. Amazon.com, which takes a regular flow of interns for its Bangalore centre, makes little distinction between an intern and the regular Amazon employee.

The scope of work includes analysis, design, programming, quality assurance, and quite possibly all of the above and more. A typical Internship Program would involve the intern and an Amazon mentor defining a project, goals and how to implement a solution to the problem at hand.

Take IBM, which follows a philosophy of "recruit once, hire twice." Such programmes are an important recruiting channel for IBM because they help management identify high-potential prospective employees. IBM offers individual and team-based assignments.

Although both categories offer project-based opportunities, individual assignments allow interns to hone their skills and independence while working as part of a larger group. Team assignments typically have four students working together on a specific project.