Making it there

Selection Process: Wipro, on paper, had a considerably difficult selection criteria. The company usually comes for campus selections and is open for all branches. They kept a CGPA criteria of at least 7 for core and 8 for non-core branches. You need to fill a form in the beginning which includes all details regarding your interest and explaining all of your personal information.

Rounds: It is then followed by an online test which has some really easy questions. I was able to nail the coding section in less than 10 minutes, which was one-third of the time they had allotted for it. The speed of solving the questions was probably a criteria too, considering the fact that I got through to the next round.

For the interview round, we had to go through two panels. The 1st one was the technical one in which interviewer asked 2-3 questions about our preferred programming language (C, C++, Java, Python), and some about the basic functioning of operating systems. He also often served us with some curveballs, like ‘What have you done for your country?’, which might make you wonder if the technical interview has morphed into an HR interview. You can expect some puzzles here, too. My HR interview was taken by a senior lead at Wipro, and he was probably way more chilled out than you’d expect an interviewer to be. A total of 13 people were selected for the internship from Roorkee. Eight among us were allotted in Bangalore, 3 got Pune and 2, Chennai.

Work

The company

Wipro is a name that needs no introduction. It was, however, an exciting time to join the firm as it recently launched a new logo and unveiled its new brand identity. The new identity would mark Wipro’s emergence as a trusted digital transformation partner to clients, delivering at global scale with increasingly localized capabilities, and leveraging hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics, cognitive and emerging technologies. The new logo, “connects the dots” for its clients integrating deep technology and domain expertise, applying insights from across industries, and consistently delivering world-class integrated, end-to-end capabilities and services, it also highlights the company’s strong technology heritage and reflects capabilities for the future.

Internship experience

It’s safe to say that a major part of your internship depends on your mentor, and I was lucky to get a really brilliant and experienced person as a one. Although he was one of the busiest people in the office, he never burdened the work on us and equivalently divided the workload among our team. Wipro also took special care to make sure that we mingle with everyone by putting me in a team of three people, all of them from a different IIT. The project we were allotted was different from the profile we had worked on. And soon enough, we realised that this is how IT works. You don’t get a project on the kind of profile you had worked on and hence you need to be prepared for everything. This project, however, was not only intellectually stimulating but also exposed me to an important real-world problem, something that I feel shall help me over the long run.

Work culture

The office hours were typical, as we were asked to work from 10 am to 5 pm on weekdays. This left weekends free for us to visit all the nearby places. Moreover, the workload was also flexible, depending on the kind of mentor you get. (I’d like to reiterate here by mentioning how your mentors are really cool people who will treat you as a younger brother during your whole internship period.) You get free snacks and beverages, daily, and a personal cubicle to work in. In a company of close to two lakh employees, the fact that an intern would get a personal working space seemed pretty cool to me! The office had a pretty free culture, as we enjoyed occasional games of pool and table tennis. Our mentor too joined us some time, but would often, in a friendly way, taunt us for wasting time here rather than working!

Summing Up

To all the people who would be targeting it for next year, the work for interns basically revolves around the development, testing, debugging and documentation, depending on the different projects Wipro gets from their clients. You can either be the part of the whole project or just a part of a minor project depending on how massive it is. The stipend is a decent one. However, there are chances that you might end up getting a mundane project, something you really can’t help yourself with. However, there is no doubt that being a part of a giant like Wipro exposes you to the most amazing business problems and you shall probably take away some key lessons on how you should deal with clients and your colleagues.