Internships have become especially important these days as organisations often give preference to students who have some experience of the “world of work”. So, students now start bagging internships from the time they are in Class IX or X, right up to their final year of college.

This was the arrangement and things were going fine till the pandemic hit. Then internships were cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to the lockdowns. Students were disappointed and worried, uncertain about how they would make up for this loss of work experience. But slowly internships have started making a comeback — in a new and evolved form. The traditional physical internships morphed into virtual internships and mentorships.

An online or virtual internship is a short-term placement that students can do from the confines of their homes. Employers use tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, email and webinars to communicate with students during such internships.

Amitabh Abhijit, a student of National Law Institute University, Bhopal, is doing his internship with a law firm in Delhi. He says, “Of course I miss working on the premises of a firm, but the work I am doing can be done remotely as well. And now I get to work from my home in Patna. Otherwise, I would have had to travel to Delhi, organise a place to stay and make arrangements for food.”

Many students enjoy the flexibility that a virtual internship offers. Shrey Chhabra, a management student from XLRI-Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur, worked on a human resource project with Citibank that involved developing a framework to track restructuring across the organisation. He missed interactions with colleagues and managers, chai breaks and learning from his group but also found some benefit of working from home. “Sometimes in an office, even if you finish your work early, you have to remain there till 7-7.30pm. But with an online internship, I could do other things after I finished my work.”

Sidhant Makil, a final-year student of Christ University, Bangalore, has a different view. He had interned before the pandemic with Grant and Thornton,

a US-based auditing firm, at their Bangalore office and definitely preferred the on-premises experience to a second internship that he did online with them. He also found that resolving issues was much simpler in the on-premise internship. He got a final placement offer from Grant and Thornton so all’s well that ends well.

Nestle launched a huge virtual internship campaign in March this year, through social media channels. College students from any discipline could apply. Aiza, a fourth year chemical engineering student, was thrilled to have bagged an internship at Nestle in quality assurance. “The last year has been filled with uncertainties and many challenges. It was not easy to land this internship as dates for the finals, which were shifted, clashed with the interview and assessment dates. But ultimately it’s a wonderful thing to have got this internship and I have something positive to look forward to now.”

Start-up firms such as HR DataQube (behavioural and psychometric testing space) and the lawexpress.com (platform for legal news and analysis) are hiring students for online internships. HR DataQube looks for students who are committed and motivated to work without supervision during the internships.

Thelawexpress.com hired about 150 law students over the last year. They hire interns who have good research and writing skills. Abhishek Shah, founder of thelawexpress.com, said that one of the changes during the pandemic is “that students can do online internships even during the academic year as they have a more time on their hands.”

Rohan Mehra, a commerce student, completed a virtual internship on data analytics from KPMG. This was through Forage, an open-access platform where students can enrol for and try out projects from KPMG, BCG, Microsoft and other Fortune 500 firms. Rohan found it organised and systematic, “background information, resources, and regular instructions — short voice messages and videos from managers required to complete the work were easily accessible”.

Unherd.in offered experiential programmes in various career domains with mentoring and industry exposure for students. But after the pandemic they have moved online. Now industry experts mentor students online in different domains such as finance, sound design, animation, artificial intelligence, robotics, pharmacology. Astha Nawandhar, a Class XII student from Deens Academy, Bangalore, enrolled first for a mentorship in general surgery and later for pharmacology. While the first programme drew her closer to her field of medicine, the second one made her realise that pharma was not the right career for her.

“It is an immersive experience of a particular career so that students can make informed career decisions going forward. Students are selected on the basis of an application submitted and an interview,” says Alister D’Monte, the founder of Unherd.

Check List

• Unherd.in

• Immrse.in

• Theforage.com

• Stoodnt.com

• Summer programmes by liberal arts colleges such as Ashoka University, FLAME University, O.P. Jindal Global University for high school students.