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Internship Report
AIESEC Development Traineeship - New Delhi, India
March – May 2004 My motivation & the search for the traineeship
This report is the concluding element of my AIESEC-Traineeship. I write this report in a rather informal style with the purpose to inform others about the process of finding an internship, my experiences and so on. There maybe some content that some people are already familiar with. In this case I would like to ask you just to ignore these passages and go on with reading if you like ;-) My traineeship took place in New Delhi, India and lasted for 9 weeks from the 8th of March to the 7th of May 2004. It was a development traineeship which means that my employer was not a company but a not-for-profit / non-governmental organization.
My motivation & the search for the traineeship In the first half of 2003 I studied for one semester abroad in New Zealand. It was a great experience being exposed to a completely different environment on the other side of the world. After I came back I began to develop the idea (and also some kind of wanderlust) to go abroad again. To make it a clearly different experience I wanted to do a traineeship to encounter the everyday working routine abroad. The idea took shape quite fast but it was very difficult to find suitable internships abroad that catered to my needs. During this period I also filled out an extensive form on the AIESEC website but later forgot about it (because there was no reply of any kind that somebody read it or what I should / could do next!). Then in November 2003 I read more or less accidentally about a workshop of AIESEC Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, Germany is my home University). I asked how to apply and also how I could apply for a traineeship. I was told that there would be an Assessment Center on the following weekend. I thought why not, turned down my party plans for the weekend and attended the Assessment Center where they told me on the second day that they would be happy to help me in finding a traineeship and send me abroad. In the following weeks I began to work through the AIESEC traineeship database on the internet. I was relatively open-minded about the country where I wanted to spend the internship (it just had to be an English-speaking country outside of Europe) but I had a rather narrow time frame because I am/was in my last year of studies and I still have/had to write my final thesis. All in all I found a few of interesting job offers and I applied with the help of my local AIESEC committee for 2 or 3 of them. Then sometime in December we received a positive answer on one of the applications from Delhi, India. Because of the Christmas holidays and the turn of the year it took a few weeks to the very beginning of January until the formal Acceptance Notes were exchanged. After that I immediately booked my ticket to India and on the 6th of March 2004 I boarded the plane heading to Delhi.
The organisation that I worked for is a middle-sized NGO called Pravah. They are based in New Delhi, India, and are (very roughly) working in the field of social awareness building among young people (students). One of their tasks is to expose Indian students from the urban areas to the rural India by organizing some exchange programs, events and other things, because even in India people from the city hardly know much about the rural life in their country.
The traineeship was part of the newly formed Corporate Social Responsibility Network that was initiated by AIESEC India. Just in the first week I got the chance to attend an AIESEC workshop on the topic of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Bangalore. That was great luck because through that I had the opportunity to do a 38-hour train journey across whole India already in the first week of my stay (which was great fun thanks to Jop, a Dutch trainee, who traveled with me). After that interesting workshop I started my work at Pravah. I was working on a new project (with the working title BUS which will be changed at a later point of time) that aims to promote and support social entrepreneurship among the Indian youth. It is a joint project of the NGO´s Ashoka India and Pravah. The vision is to develop a sustained culture, environment and support for youth social entrepreneurship in India. BUS plans to accomplish this by launching outstanding youth social entrepreneurs throughout India. The launch process will involve extensive training of candidates in social entrepreneurship, mentoring and coaching by leading social entrepreneurs, and financial support to seed youth social entrepreneurship projects. Simultaneously, the program will try to expand its reach to social entrepreneurs to build widespread commitment to, and processes and cultures for youth development in leading social organisations. When I joint Pravah in March 2004 the project was just in its initial start-up phase. At this point of time Ashoka and Pravah were setting up the whole specification of the young social entrepreneur award program: how it should look like, what it should contain, how it should be implemented and so on. In the first two weeks I conducted a web-based research on existing similar award program worldwide. The goal was to find out about best practice examples and how they exactly look like. I was able to set up a small database containing 21 more or less suitable examples of award programs all-over the world. After that I was supposed to do some more research on some other topics connected to the project but someone found out that somebody of the partner NGO Ashoka already did this work so that I was made more or less redundant instantly. Fortunately there were enough things on the project that had not yet been thought through and so we developed two other main tasks for me. The first one was to write a complete draft marketing report for the award program. As there were no fixed plans, strategies and schemes about the marketing of the project at this point of time, the aim was to write a report with first proposals and options. The purpose of this report was to generate ideas and show possible marketing routes that could be used as a basis for further discussions among the people who were responsible for the project. I had great fun in working on this report because it was something that I had learned in theory in university and now I was able to use my knowledge in practice. It took about 4 weeks from the first thought till I finished the final version of my marketing plan. At some point of time I also began to work on my second big project which was a report about the application and selection procedure for the award program. The purpose of this report was to give an introductory overview and initial thoughts/ideas for the application and selection process for the candidates of the young social entrepreneur award. It consisted mainly of a summary of possible modules for a multi-stage selection procedure. The report should provide a basis for further and more in-depth discussions about the selection process for the projects candidates. I worked on this report for about 3 weeks. One of the best things about these tasks was that I was responsible for the two reports completely on my own. Both reports were my own special projects and I was given free hand in conducting my research and writing these reports. In my last week of work I prepared a presentation in which I presented the results of my work to my colleagues. Next to these main tasks I also worked on some other projects. The most important (and time consuming one) was to work on a website that is maintained by Pravah: http://www.younginfluencers.com. The web-designer that worked on this site just changed and so I worked with the new programmer, gave some help and advice on the restructuring of the website and operated sometimes as a kind of interface between my organisation and the programmer.
The internship was a great experience and I am pretty sure that I helped me to change and improve my point of view, my attitude toward a lot of things and also my whole personality! First of all I do have to admit that I had to struggle quite a bit at the beginning. Delhi was just so different from what I knew so far. It is noisy, dusty, hectic and often quite stressful. But after I while I managed to adjust to this new situation quite good and that made me confident that I am able to cope with a new and very different working and especially living environment. Nevertheless you get reminded at every corner that India is indeed still a developing country and I perceived it mainly as the country of the extremes - and the country of moustaches ;-) : One the one hand there are lots of very nice and helpful people and on the other hand (especially when you are traveling) you have lots of very annoying tourist touts and others who try to rip you off just because you look like are a foreign tourist. There are lots of very nice places and really unique and impressive monuments and sometimes there are awful places (e.g. wild garbage dumps) right next to it. There are also expensive western style shops and (a few) shopping malls were you can buy expensive stuff and there are also lots of very poor neighborhoods, villages and slums. All these impressions were an important part of my stay in India and I also had the opportunity see quite a lot of places on the weekends (Thanks a lot to Pravah that they made this possible by giving me the weekends completely off!!!). If you are interested in some pictures of my journeys have a look at here!
I am very glad that I did the traineeship at Pravah. It gave me hands-on experience on how to live and work in a very different cultural environment and also it was great fun to meet some very nice people (the other international interns, my colleagues, people from AIESEC India and others) and to travel a bit through North India. With 9 weeks (+ another 2 weeks of trekking in the Himalaya afterwards) my traineeship was quite short. Nevertheless I got a great insight into the work of Pravah and it were really exciting 9 weeks and for me the timing was almost perfect. At the end I was also a little bit looking forward going home again because with all the working during the week and traveling on the weekends it was a quite stressful (but exciting) time ;-) Before I finish with this report I would like to thank a few people: Thanks to Pranav from AIESEC India and his whole family for their great help and hospitality especially in the first week of my stay. Thanks to my colleagues at Pravah – it was great fun working with them and they are all really nice people! And also thanks to Matthias from AIESEC Düsseldorf who helped me with the AIESEC application procedure!
Well, I think thats about it. I hope I could give you a little insight about my traineeship in India and that this short report is of some help for you!! If you have some further questions dont hesitate to contact me! Please try it first via phone on my landline cause this is the fastest and easiest way for me. Rüdiger Hahn in May 2004
There is a collection of books recommendations on the german part of my homepage for those of you who want to learn more about India or who plan to go there. Have a look here and here. If you´re interested in some pictures of North India have a look at my photo archive here. |
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