Prakriti - ICICI Lombard and Lightstone Technologies

Hi everyone! I’m Prakriti Shetty, a third year student majoring in Chemical Engineering and pursuing a minor in Digital Health Informatics at the Koita Center for Digital Health.
I’ve stayed in Mumbai most of my life. I love writing, reading non-fiction, listening to music( my roommate is dead tired of Stitches ~(Shawn Mendes) blaring out of my laptop) and since pretty recently, astronomy as well, so yeah I’m someone who has weirdly varied interests. Oh and coding of course.

I did two internships (wouldn’t recommend :P), one at a startup called Lightstone Technologies as a full stack developer and the other at ICICI Lombard GIC Pvt Ltd as a data analyst, and apart from those, a whole lot of 3rd-year intern season preparation.

I’d kind of finalised software as my field of interest in the 4th sem, and the main motivation to take up two internships was the diversity in the roles I was being assigned. It was almost like I could explore two different branches of the software field simultaneously and I really liked the prospect of that.

I got shortlisted in ICICI through an opportunity floated by the KCDH team, and the Lightstone one through the PT cell.
ICICI had a technical as well as HR round and Lightstone just had the technical round. The technical rounds were similar, they asked about the projects I’d mentioned in my resume, and asked me to technically elaborate on the backend development internship I’d done in the past winter. A bit of fundamentals of ML as well. Lightstone even questioned on ReactJS ( it was either about states or routes, I’m not too sure)
As for preparation, I had a document prepared, called my resume prep sheet. I’d carefully scrutinize each resume point try to extract all possible ways they could question me off that and then prepare potential answers by going through the project PPTs/ reports or plain random googling and boy did it work! That’s a tried and tested way to know your resume well :)
For the basics of ML I just went through some websites and did the ones mentioned on my resume particularly well.
The best thing about 2nd-year internships is that they don’t expect a lot from you. You just have to be sure to include substantial skills and technical expertise in your resume through projects/ PoRs etc, be really thorough with whatever you’ve written there ( and related topics) and then just go in with a bucketload of enthusiasm.

A little about my roles. In Lightstone, I worked primarily on the Django-ReactJS stack to build 2 websites for their indoor positioning and navigation system. In ICICI, I worked with huge datasets, executed data pipelines in python, and then built an ML model for health insurance premium pricing.

If you’re wondering what a day in my summer looked like, it started with ICICI’s daily standup, where I gave updates about the work done the previous day. Then we’d generally discuss pointers for improvisation and finetuning and I’d have the entire day to work on it. The working hours weren’t fixed, I had the flexibility to work at my leisure and I really enjoyed that freedom. The day went by working a bit on ICICI work and a bit of my personal DSA prep in the afternoon then by evening I’d start work on Lightstone, ready for the standup every night at 9. Then again, intern season prep after dinner. The routine would go on throughout the week, with respite on weekends, when I’d take a break from intern work and focus fully on DSA/resume prep.
I couldn’t have been more satisfied with the outcome. I learnt a lot about both fields and it just strengthened my decision to opt for this particular field as my career choice.

Gyaan 1: Learn as much as you can in your internship, it’s the best way to judge if you are interested in the field or not.
Gyaan 2: Always try to get involved to know the bigger picture of the firm as a whole, it helps to know what exactly are you contributing to and how it helps the firm. Keeps you motivated and responsible.
Gyaan 3: Just keep a lookout for all the opportunities, PT cell isn't the only way to secure internships, there are a whole lot of external opportunities that open up for particularly second-year students. Also, take advantage of our alumni network, they’re super helpful and I did land an interview at a huge company because of that once. Just use the internet to your advantage, that’s all I’ll say. Oh and you can always hit me up in case you need resources or pointers or (more) random gyaan.

Cheers and all the best!