Guest post by Aishwarya Agarwal, summer intern at Zaakpay. Aishwarya is a final year engineering student at Delhi Technological University (formerly Delhi College of Engineering). This post was not edited by Zaakpay.
When I was done with my semester exams, it was time for me to try and opt for an industrial training (internship) for two months. Zaakpay came for on-campus recruitments in my college, Delhi College of Engineering and I was offered a “developer intern” role. Aspiring to learn skills and apply knowledge in a live project, Zaakpay turned out to be a perfect workplace. The assignments that I was provided with were not only constrained to gain knowledge but were also crucially important for Zaakpay’s development. This gave me a sense of belongingness to the company.
I got an experience about how a start-up company works to develop itself each and every day. The productivity of each and every employee and intern in Zaakpay was mentored by the founders of the company, Ms. Upasana Taku and Mr. Bipin Preet Singh. In the first week, I was made acquainted with “what” and “how” the work of Zaakpay was being carried. Then I was told to look into the web application of Zaakpay and debug it. I reduced the loading time of the zaakpay website. My next assignment was regarding the establishment of the payment flow from merchant side. I won’t go into technical details as such, but the whole work required me to understand the code that was already there in the web application and make changes in the code to establish payment flow from the merchant’s site.
It was not that feasible for me to commute daily from my place to the office, so I was given the relaxation of coming alternate days to the office to commit my work and could work online from home. This saved my time and even added to the day wise productivity. It’s good that you can get such ease of working environment in start-ups. Working in zaakpay was like, you are briefed up about a business logic that needs to be implemented in “some way”, and then you go your own way to find the best way possible, “google” it, try implementing it, if you are stuck in between you will get the guidance and help from Zaakpay employees and in the end when you solve a problem you end up saying “Yippie! I did that!”
The best part is that you work for the company and you see that your work is going live on their site. And once you are done with one of your assignments, the next assignment is on its way to be accomplished by you. Zaakpay was never short of work, and that too crucial work.
The “fun” part of my internship was not less. The best time that I had in my internship period was in a party that was thrown for my co-intern’s birthday. The party was real fun, not just because of the birthday cake, drinks and snacks (which were obvious for a birthday party) but for the time we (me and my office colleagues) spent as friends. J
Now, when I hear from my friends who worked in well-known companies for two months of their internship I can very well see the difference that most of them were not assigned much crucial or contributing work for the company they worked for. I mean, they were not expected much from their mentors apart from submitting a report or doing some research, etc. whereas in Zaakpay, I had a role to play and be a part of the company. There was no hierarchical kind of environment, I shared what knowledge I gained and even helped and worked with Zaakpay employees. You don’t get heard much being an intern in those “high” profile companies. Rather, I was more like an employee at Zaakpay. In all, my experience as an Intern at Zaakpay had worth in all three aspects of “technical knowledge”, “friends” and “stipend”. J
For those, who are more prone to acquire knowledge and learn how it feels to work in an IT industry as a full-time employee, Zaakpay is a good place to join.