An Intern's Summer

'Oh Shit! Oh Shit! Oh Shit! I'm late! Gotta get my bath! Gotta get ready!'

Eyes half closed, I crawl to the bathroom and open the taps. Rush back to the still dark room to grab my stuff.  Glance sideways at the clock and...oh damn! Not again!

Climb back under the covers and go back to sleep. It's just two-thirty am.

Fast-forward by four hours and am on my feet again, throwing on some clothes, stuffing things in my bag and gobbling down breakfast. It's a work day and I don't wanna be late!

With this kind of desperation to get at my desk, you'd think I'm getting paid by the hour. But sadly, I'm not even making a penny. It's an internship, just for experience's sake.

The thing is, for the first time in my life I'm feeling confident about not being stuck in the wrong place. I'm enjoying my work, even though it's all male-dominated, but, hell, if a man's brain can grasp it, a woman can totally crack it :P

I'm enrolled for a seven-week internship at the Engineering division of Larsen and Toubro in Faridabad.
Everyday I travel for roughly an hour one-way on Delhi's famous DTC bus service. In two weeks, I've accomplished it all- running after buses, taking the wrong route, getting off in no-man's-land, trying to make sense out of dilli-autowalah's logic and getting lost in the maze of Noida's sectors.

But thankfully, all this mayhem lasts only up to the entrance gates of my destination. Inside the office, there's a calm- no, it's not the calm before a storm, but a lingering calmness that leads you to your work while relaxing your tensed brain muscles ( maybe it's the air conditioner). No work ever gets done without first injecting caffeine in your bloodstream. Talking about work, I always thought these big corporate houses made a slave out of you but what I saw here was quite different. The most common use of the internet was to browse through the news or shopping sites! My mentor tells me that since they are in the final stages of their project, they have a lot of free time in their hands. Cool enough! They don't exactly teach us to slog throughout the year at engineering schools, do they? We're accustomed to putting ourselves through brief periods of intense work. :P

I haven't been really able to figure out how I feel about being here and the work. The thing is, at the end of the day, I'm too tired to give a label to what I went through during the day. Some days, when I get a new problem to tackle, it's interesting and busy. The very next day, when the problem becomes stale, it gets boring and I'm just strolling through.

The good part is that the people are friendly and helpful.
The bad part is that they banned trainees from using the net.
The best part is that I'm having a nice time, meeting new people and learning something.
The worst part is that I'm sleep deprived.

The next thing I have to figure out is how far can an introvert get in a system like this. Oh, there's a long way to go. So much more to see and learn about. 'Training' doesn't really end, does it?'