Friday, April 4, 2008

I joined, my recruiter left!


The first couple of days of my summer internship have been just awesome! I don’t know if Deloitte treats all their employees as they are treating us or if this is just a short two-month fling where you get carried away with all the romance and mush and then after you settle down in the relationship you are taken for granted, and all that affection just fizzle out! But as of now, I am definitely enjoying all the attention and pampering!

To begin with they are paying us obscene amounts of money and honestly I don’t see why! Over and above, they have given us comfortable accommodation, breakfast and lunch coupons along with travel facilities- all of which is complimentary. And yeah, they took us out for dinner tonight!
At office, each of the trainees has been assigned buddies and team leaders who have been extremely friendly, helpful and ready to share. We have been extended a warm welcome and even the senior employees who recruited us have taken time out of their schedule, flown down to Hyderabad from Mumbai, explained to us about the organization, the different functions and their expectations from us. It’s a very well structured programme and our daily schedule is planned to make sure that we don’t even have time to visit the bathroom. It’s worse than the Symbi time table without the luxury of bunking lectures or sleeping in the back bench. The first week we are going to be on training after which we will be working with our designated project guides. I am in the Competitive Intelligence team(within the SR&I function) which essentially evaluates the performance of Deloitte vis-à-vis its competitors in the different functions like tax, audit, advisory and consulting and also tracks the other firms on a regular basis. I am glad it’s not hard core number crunching but it’s funny that I am department which has “intelligence” in its title and let’s just be honest: me and intelligence don’t exactly go hand in hand! Then again, that’s the irony of life…

I was so scared that after all the tall promises and impressive presentations replete with intimidating jargon, the reality would be quite different! I have known companies where summer trainees are treated as a pain in the neck who only get in the way. At the end of the day, in spite of fancy project titles all you do is get bored, check emails, google and chat away to glory punctuated with trips to the washroom and the vending machine. It takes a lot of effort and time to actually teach somebody and not too many people are keen to take up that responsibility.

Also, I kind of developed a tiny little crush on the VP from Boston (with the quintessential MIT accent) who had hired me and we had an awesome time during my interview discussing our common passion for literature. During the induction he spoke to us for about 2 hours and I listened, enraptured. Like my dad, he just makes a living out of finance, but he talks philosophy and literature: the language that enthralls me! Even after 6 months he remembered my name (and pronounced it correctly). But the sad part is that it was his last day in the Hyderabad office and now he is going back to Boston! Still we managed to steal a snap with him…

2 comments:

Neeraj said...

U keep getting spoilt...Dont u !

Nefertiti said...

@ neeraj
well given my sweet nature, ppl automatically want 2 spoil me :)