Internship Insights by IIM Kashipur students: Summer Internship Experience at ICICI Bank
Interning at ICICI Bank has been a fortunate and great learning experience. In these unprecedented and uncertain times, it’s a great opportunity to be a part of such an organization. Even in this chaos, it provided us with all the support and never made the virtual internship feel like as if it was a compromise or just an obligation. It started with the virtual onboarding of all the interns across B-schools and interactive sessions with various officials in leadership positions and the plan for the next 8 weeks was well laid out. Since then the buddy and mentor have been constant guides in this journey who helped at every roadblock and bottlenecks that came in the way.
The interns were assigned some of the best live projects at ICICI in various domains be it HR, Strategy, Marketing, Analytics etc. Working on these live projects helped me understand how it’s like to be working in the organization and what role different people play in different positions. This gave us a better clarity of the role, the challenges, and the expectations from that role.
My project was about finding the Dark Data present in the bank and to generate business use cases for the same. This project was a mix of strategy and analytics and is especially important in today’s world as data is all around us. It becomes much more important to find out the dark data in the organization because experts estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the data in any organization is unstructured and the amount of unstructured data in enterprises is growing significantly, often many times faster than structured databases are growing. Moreover, according to an analysis by Harvard Business Review, less than half of an organization’s structured data is used in making business decisions, and less than 1% of unstructured data is used in any way at all. So, we can see we have such a huge database (in exabytes) in the organizations that goes totally unused and what can be the results in terms of profits if this data is put into use. I worked on finding out the dark data present in particular products under trade finance and seeing as to what the applications of that data in the banking sector could be. The project also required to identify the vendors that could help ICICI in structuring the unstructured data that we have and reaching out to them to identify the vendor who can meet our requirements.
The project gave clarity of how it is like to be working in the Banking Industry, understanding the different products and jargon of banking, and how the system as a whole is functioning. The internship provides a platform for the B-school candidates to put the theoretical knowledge gained during classes into practical applications. The courses taught in IIM Kashipur have been helpful and relevant to find insights on the project. Various tools that were taught like SPSS, Power BI came extremely handy to derive insights and finally present the output. The internship has been a truly enriching experience in terms of the insights it gives about the industry and the expectation from MBA graduates once they join organizations as full-time employees after a year. Moreover, it also provides students with a chance to hone their skills and improve upon the weak areas which they might have felt during the internship in the final year to come ahead.
Apart from this, the campus team kept everyone engaged during these 8 weeks even in these unusual times by arranging various sessions with the people in leadership positions, keeping short quizzes at the end of each week on some topic related to banking, making themed templates which made people interact with each other and kept the interns engaged which never made us feel like that we had missed out on something.
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Parul Gupta, Summer Intern, ICICI Bank
Class of 2021 | IIM Kashipur
