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Hello! I am Swanand, a fourth-year chemE undergrad. In my third year summers, I interned at Jaguar Land Rover at their Bangalore office. The internship was completely offline and lasted for ten weeks. After 1.5 yrs of the online semester, an offline internship was altogether a different experience. It was wonderful to experience the daily drizzles and cool climate of Bangalore. The traffic and people discussing startup ideas in busses was a headache :D Else everything was great.
On the first day, we were called to Taj Hotel (also from TATA :) ) for a 10-hr long induction where we were assigned projects and introduced to our managers. The next day we were at office. The culture in the JLR office was completely different from what I had expected. All the graduates they hire are from IITs, so the culture is the same as that we experience in our insti. The office follows an open plan, so even the JLR India head is highly approachable ;) There were frequent fun events like badminton tournaments and jam nights!
For interns to experience office culture, the internship was offline, but for employees, they have a flexible policy (people can WFH). The best part was that the office timings were not so stringent. It was on us when to come and when to go.
There were forty interns all across various top IITs. Ten were in the Mechanical Division, twenty in Electrical and ten in the Software Division. All interns were accommodated on the same premises. We spent weekends together, went to parties together making up two super fun months.
In software, there were various teams - ADAS, Testing and Validation, etc. I was part of the Validation team.
My project was to break an existing monolithic application into microservices and establish a communication protocol between them. I didn’t have any prior experience in software development as such, so it wasn't easy initially for me to find a start, but after various discussions with team members and the manager, I started getting hold over the project, and at the end of the internship my project got approval and will soon get in production. Therefore having skills a priory is not essential. You can learn them as you progress, but the intent to learn is important, and that’s what companies want from interns.
During the second half of the internship, a 36-hr hackathon was organised. Various JLR teams from Ireland, UK, China and India competed on various problem statements. For two days, my team and I were at the office and had no sleep. It was exhausting but the grind taught a lot.
Looking back, my experience at JLR was nothing short of a dream. I learned various technologies and the automobile industry in general but most importantly made many friends and happy memories which I will cherish forever.