My First Ever Internship; Experience and Challenges I Faced

Hey there,
This May, I had an opportunity as an intern in an IT Company called 9Commerce at Kochi Infopark with two of my classmates, Afna and Sanooj. It was a 30-day internship. So today I'm going to share about my first-ever internship, struggles I encountered, and more.

Our First Day

The first day was the most tense day we faced. We arrived at the office almost 1 hour earlier. We were all so nervous; it's actually our very first internship, and we've never had an experience like this before. Also, it was the first time we visited inside an IT company. At first, the COO of that branch, Mr. Vinoj V K, welcomed us. He was a very friendly person. After that, he made the introduction to the employees. I have to admit, we were all a bit nervous. Being an introvert myself, having everyone's eyes on me gave me a panic attack. All the staff cheered us and one of the employees was actually our super senior. So he was the one who looked after us.

Our First Day

Those days really gave us chills in our veins. We don't know anything other than HTML, CSS and some basic JavaScript. So we dedicated our first 10 days to learn JavaScript. We surfed through the documentation, referred to websites like W3Schools, and finally YouTube. By that time, we managed to create two small projects: a website for Supercell and a web app for weather forecast using the OpenWeatherMap API.

Overcoming Challenges

One significant challenge was that I didn't have a laptop, while my friends did! Initially, this was the major hurdle we faced, but we quickly adapted to sharing the laptops. After a few days, it was a seamless part of our routine. We never faced an issue with the lack of laptop availability again. It demonstrates our ability to work as a team, adapt to the situation, and support each other.

There was a challenge we faced that we needed to endure until the end. The “AC”! I'm not joking! It was centralized AC. During that time, outside it was above 40°C. It is hilarious whenever I think about it: if we go outside, there is this extreme heat like we are burning, but if we enter the building, it's like we are in the North Pole. Also, Afna was shivering like she had fallen into cold water. She always sits in the center of us like a small kitten whenever she is shivering.

Learning and Teaching

By that time, we acquired the basic skills to create a basic website. So we moved on to the next stage: “Git.” I'm the only one who is familiar with Git and GitHub. So I took the initiative to teach them, “What is it and how to use it?”. After teaching them enough about Git, we moved on to the next stage: “backend.” For the backend, we chose Node.js and Express, but we only know basic JavaScript. It was challenging for us. We watched multiple videos regarding Node.js courses on YouTube. Meanwhile, we looked after MongoDB too. By that time, we managed to create a form-submitting web page where the submitted data is stored inside MongoDB.

The Last Stretch

For the rest of the 15 days, we shifted our focus to our project, an auditorium booking website. We named it VenueVerse. We split our work: Sanooj and Afna will look after the designing and home details pages, and I'll be the one who works on Node.js and MongoDB. At first, I created a login page for our website. It took me three days to create the login page; the hurdles were the session and password hashing. By that time, both of them managed to create the homepage. But I didn't like the website theme. So, I fully redesigned and created the entire homepage from scratch. Surprisingly, I completed it within one day. But connecting the homepage with the login page and session took me days to complete. Meanwhile, both of them completed other pages of the website according to my new design and theme.

Somehow we managed to complete our website with so many bugs and loopholes. We sought a helping hand from the employees. They helped us to complete the website, but it was not good enough. Even though we submitted it to the COO. Because it's already the 27th day, we only have 3 days left. Also we had internal exams on the second week of June and semester exams on the third week. Vinoj sir and Ajay sir explained the mistakes we made in our project and especially Ajay sir taught us how to solve those mistakes and errors. Considering our exams we completed our internship at the 27th day.

Fun Friday: A Break From Coding

Every Friday, the company hosts “Fun Friday” sessions where all the employees, including the COO, as well as us interns, gather around and play some mini-games for 30 minutes. Those sessions are joyful moments with so much fun. Everyone splits into two teams and plays games like “Guess the Movie”. It is so helpful for us to become closer to our colleagues.

Final Thoughts and Future Plans

As our internship came to an end, we felt a mix of accomplishment and determination. We were committed to refining our auditorium booking website, learning from our mistakes, and submitting it as our final year college project. The experience taught us much more than technical skills, it showed us the importance of teamwork, perseverance, adaptive mentality and continuous learning.

This internship was a transformative journey, and I am grateful for the opportunity to grow alongside my friends in a supportive and dynamic environment.

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Conclusion

So that wraps up my experience and the challenges I faced during my very first internship in an IT company. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it and following me on social media.

I've recently started a series about Useful Resources for Learning Programming that you might find interesting, so be sure to check that out too.

Thank you for reading :)