Sohini Sarkar is a fourth year student in the Department of Electrical Engineering. She talks about her summer experience while interning at Samsung in Bangalore.
Samsung India Software Operations Pvt. Ltd. or SISO is one of Samsung’s global R&D centres. In fact, it is the largest R&D centre outside Korea for Samsung Electronics. With a strength of 3000 employees, SISO works on cutting edge technologies involving wireless, networking, convergence, digital and semiconductor.
SISO came to IITM for the first time to recruit interns from pre-final B.Tech students of only Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Being a software research centre, software development was the only profile that they offered. The selection procedure consisted of a fairly simple written test based on C programming. Based on the score, a shortlist was made for the final interview. The interview mostly consisted of HR questions since an HR employee had come for the selection. At the end, four students from Electrical and three students from Computer Science made it to the final list.
SISO has offices in four buildings in Bangalore, three of which are located at Bagmane Tech Park (BTP) and the fourth one in JP Tech Park. About 100 interns chosen from 8 IITs were divided into 2 batches with the first batch joining on 14th May and the second one on 16th May. IITM students were listed in the first batch and I turned out to be the only girl among 52 interns joining with me! The first two days saw us through the usual orientation program, presentations on the company, security, work culture, etc. We also had some team building events like making bridges out of newspaper. At the end of the second day, all interns were allocated projects and the internship kick-started into full gear.
I was assigned to work with the Wireless Messaging Group of the Wireless Products and Solutions Team. My project was to develop and implement an email aggregator for a global instant messaging service. In Wikipedia’s words, an aggregator simply refers to a web site or computer software that aggregates a specific type of information from multiple online sources. So, my job was to do the following: 1. Create server side scripts using PHP to build a database which would classify and store the emails based on definite topics. 2. Configure a web server using MySQL which would maintain this database. The project spanned over 9 weeks till 13th July and hence, the work was comfortably spaced out and I had enough time to learn PHP and MySQL from scratch and then apply my newly acquired skills.
The evaluation procedure varied from team to team. In my case, I had to make a video of the working of the messaging service employing the features of the aggregator. Other interns had to give a presentation and yet others simply had to hand in a report. Apart from these evaluation procedures based on the project work, all the interns had to write an aptitude test too.
Now, why does it make sense to do an internship at SISO? To start with, the work culture at SISO is simply amazing. There is so much energy and passion floating around at the workplace that you can’t help but get infected. SISO is one of the fastest growing research and software development centres, encompassing a wide range in technology domain. Be it developing new Android apps or operating systems or even printer software and drivers, you can find all kinds of latest technology being exploited and redefined. There is no dearth of exciting work over here if all you want to do is to code and develop software. Work timings are a bit strict, though. A regular employee should clock at least 9 hours a day. Last but not the least, like most of the other corporate companies, SISO provides free breakfast, lunch and dinner to all its employees and runs its private pickup and drop bus services.
I had a wonderful experience all the while at SISO and in Bangalore too since it was my first visit to the City of Gardens. As claimed by almost everyone who visits the city, Bangalore is an awesome city to stay and settle down, thanks to the consistent pleasant and cool weather.
