I was more than a month into my summer vacation of 2013 and  I still hadn’t figured a convincing answer to “What’s your plan  ahead?”. Talking to my very futuristic friends who had everything  in place made me feel miserable. Well actually, miserable is an understatement  for that situation. I knew that I had to do something and it needed  to be done quickly. The lack of a strong network and contacts from the  industry led me nowhere at all.

The final year of graduation was set to commence in  around fifty days and interning after graduation didn’t really go  well with the trend. People had made me believe that graduation eventually  translated into a full time job;  the thought obviously scared me but  what scared me even more was that I would have no kind of industry experience  until graduation.

You know how a worm enters a fruit and slowly eats  up all the pulp inside? Yeah, that’s exactly how the fright was creeping  in.

The main reason for not doing anything was the lack  of awareness of work options. After a few days of vainly brainstorming  over the issue, one of my friends shared some information with me about  the company that had taken her as an intern. She was working as a research  intern at Quipper Research Pvt. Ltd, which is an intensive qualitative  market research firm. When I first heard about what the work was, I  was completely put off by it. Coming back to the main situation.. I  was totally doomed and as they say, beggars can’t be choosers; not  that there was any kind of pressure to try it out, but then again- why  not? This led me to applying for the internship and to my surprise,  I got through.

I now had a plan in hand, which seemed more like a  laboratory experiment. The repetitive “Congratulations on your first  step in the corporate world” from corporate slaves around me made  me more nervous than excited. The first day of the internship would  settle the pandemonium of crazy thoughts that kept disturbing my otherwise  peaceful (more like blank) mindset.

The work I did at the internship turned out to be  a lot more interesting than my anticipation. One of the biggest reasons  that I liked going to work every day was the team I worked with. At  Quipper, i had two supervisors who were just a few years elder to me.  They always made sure that my working as well as non-working days were  “chilled out”.

My bosses, Piyul Mukherjee and Pia Mollback-Verbic  have been the most approachable people I’ve met. Although they were  not always in office due to their frequent business travelling schedule,  I never felt the void of a guiding and encouraging power house of energy  that they are. Through the internship, I also got the chance to interact  with international clients who aloke to me about their lifestyle, their  work schedules, places they wanted to visit in Mumbai, amongst other  topics of discussion. I experienced the main essence of market research  when I was chosen for IHVs. An IHV (In Home Visit) is basically when  interviewers visit the house of a respondent to understand his/her lifestyle,  attitudes and behaviours. This was where I personally spoke to respondents  and was seen as a person on the research team. The feeling was truly  amazing!

Although it was only a month long internship, I learned  quite a lot in that period. It was a perfectly productive mix of creatively  engaging projects, a friendly working environment and extremely supportive  seniors. The internship was my first interaction with market research  and it ‘triggered ‘ (Am I getting the MR lingo right?) my passion for  becoming a researcher.

Northpoint has a plethora of marketing research knowledge,  with a well designed curriculum and practical market insights from eminent  Nielsen researchers; knowledge which once absorbed, can turn an aspirant  into a creative thinker, a witty strategist and above all, a winning  researcher.

By

Mohit Hirlekar, PR Delegate, MarComm Council

PGPMR 2014-15