Internship experience at Sprinklr

My internship at Sprinklr rekindled my joy and passion for learning and pushed my limits to work hard and exceed. The ideology of "fix it, don't complain" and "never ever give up, ever" were instilled in me throughout the journey, vastly changing my outlook.

The experience

I wanted to start the story from where I first heard about Sprinklr. It was just before the company's coding round towards the end of August. I managed to squeeze into the interview rounds, crawling and moving ahead with the three rounds of heavy interviews. I was eating dal-chawal before the start of my 2nd round, running around the house like crazy to dress up again and sit in front of the laptop with a proper tie, shirt, and shorts below. Tip for juniors who might be hearing this for the nth time; practice DSA for the coding round and have at least 1-2 good projects that you can explain in your interview. Also, be happy, calm, and composed during the interview, ask for further explanations, and be vocal about your thought process for approaching questions. They also want to hire you if you show them you are capable enough to leave a mark. You can check more about the questions here.

The interviews were tough (especially the second one), but luckily my name was on the final selection list. I remember being so happy that I jumped, laughed, and cried simultaneously. All of my friends and family were ecstatic.

Fast forward to April, when I received a list of 2-page long pre-reads to complete before the start of the internship. Although I was put in the ML team, none of it helped me directly, but it was definitely helpful. When I received my awesome ‘Welcome Kit’ and laptop in June, I felt like a kid opening and unboxing the big packages. I couldn't get a MacBook due to logistics issues, but the Surface Book 2 was a stunner.

The first week started with a bunch of orientations from the Culture & Talent (C&T) Team. On the first day, my manager gave me a pep talk about how working hard is our duty as students. They gave me five courses on Coursera on deep learning and fastAI to complete in a week (it would usually take approximately 1-2 months even if you try to do it at full speed). I'm not complaining about the work being more. They didn't understand my situation from college, where I usually chill out all day. Also, I had zero knowledge about ML, so I guess a tiny yay! (and heart attack). Moving forward, I met my mentor. I had some chill and refreshing conversations with him and finished a few more courses. Then we got to the meat of this internship, my topic, Speaker Diarization, which in layman's terms simply means 'who spoke when in an audio call'. Completely clueless, I searched Google and Google Scholar (yes, the boring one with no photos) and started my exploration of the completely new topic. Unfortunately, my topic was on the difficult side.

Even my mentor was unsure about the field, so I had to do a lot of heavy lifting myself. Going forward, I slowly started to grasp things about what was going on and gave a decent mid-term presentation. In between, the whole hustle and bustle, I had the opportunity to listen to the inspiring words of CEO Ragy Thomas. After that, I got two more side projects of text classification and continuously worked on my main project. Finally, I got everything prepped up for my final PPT, and it went great. I had prepared detailed charts and visualisations along with the theory behind them to explain any question that could be thrown by the team members seeing my PPT. On the last day, I thanked my mentor for guiding me throughout the internship while he thanked me for making his life easier ;). The journey was not easy, but it was more than fruitful when I heard the news of receiving a PPO offer.

There are a few tips here as well; this may be new for juniors; keep track of everything you do in a sheet as it will be easier for you to compile everything and tell about what you have worked upon and completed. Don't depend on your mentor and manager to solve issues for you; keep pushing yourself hard even when you face errors and setbacks and present them with solutions, not problems (enter promotion of a Sprinklr's core value…" never ever give up, ever"). Daily update your manager about what you did that day and keep them in the loop. They have the idea of where you can go wrong and can give you insights from their experience about the task you are trying to tackle. If you face a problem that can't be fixed, don't wait but immediately reach out. Keep consistency in your working efforts giving yourself time to cool off. You don't have to give 100% on one day working 14 hours and become dull on other days. And finally, keep an open mind and enjoy the journey. You will definitely get to learn a lot!

That's all the bhajan keertan for now. Tata!