Internship experience at NVIDIA

The first year of B.Tech was the fun experience of crossing the bridge from school to college while learning diverse things from filing pieces of wood to making keychains to Relativity. The second-year was focussing our lens towards the chosen branch and oh NO! Covid-19! The third year unlocked a hidden level - internships. It was a wakeup call to those well versed in the practice of last-day preparations. Thus began the era of online coding rounds and zoom interviews. I ended up with a summer internship at NVIDIA to my own surprise. There were three stages to my internship-related anxieties.

• The uneasy 'what do I do?' before getting one.
• The confused ‘what will I do?’ in that gap between the confirmation and the actual start date.
• The terrified ‘what am I doing?’ while the internship was going on.

The third one was arguably the funniest, with lots of metaphorical trip-ups, accidental file erasures, wrong usage of commands, and lots and lots of seeking help (mostly from the angelic mentor of mine).

The internship began, as always, with a HR meeting. Then the manager introduced us, interns, to the team and the mentors to their internlings. My mentor was a gem of a person, really. He showed us the way around the virtual workspace (the computer terminal) and gave us all the necessary resources and one-on-one sessions to get us up to speed. Then he left us to our tasks, always ready to hop in and save us from total system destruction. My objective was to correct the bugs in an already existing project and make it work better. So it involved learning the tool used, then exploring the loooong codebase, and finally jumping across files to catch those pesky little bugs. Time breeds familiarity and familiarity, in turn, builds speed. There was a tangible difference I felt each passing week.

I guess the goal of an internship is to experience and traverse the connected space between formal education and profession. Nothing justifies the purpose of having classroom courses than actually witnessing the concepts being put to use in practice. You go, "AAH!!! Finally! FINALLY!! So THIS is why?!!". I was fortunate enough to be involved in a project that was closely connected to a few recently learned lessons. But also, nothing shows you how different a workplace is than actually being amidst professionals while they are at it in earnest.

There was this Team meeting once to discuss the developments in an ongoing project. I was to be a silent spectator: silent in awe I was, and a spectacular event it was. Everyone had their points concise and ready. It was a witty, quickfire exchange of progress updates and hurdles faced and solution suggestions. It wasn't the endless droning I was promised by the revered internet joke community. It was so sinuous that it could only have been scripted by the book club gods. "Doth shall not ask that here", responded one of the managers when some query went out of range. Never had I felt more aware of how much of a 'student' I still was. But I will always remember that instantaneous feeling of 'I want that’.

In the end, I learned about how learning persists even at work; how all projects start with an intense ramping up period; how it’s okay to be clueless at the start (but not always!); how communication is crucial; how an organization is a human engine and not a controlling and vaguely terrifying abstract entity; and above all, how an internship is an opportunity cooked up by the universe to provide you free t-shirts!