This post has been pending for too long, and since I recently started working in my first full-time job, I wanted to go back and look down the memory lane to see where it all started – my first step into the professional world. This was in the summer of 2015 in Bangalore where I was interning for a company called MGaadi , now merged with Yatra. It was a start-up, with around sixty people in total and three people handling the technology aspect. I started in the first week of May – reaching Bangalore a day before my internship began. I had a cousin there, who helped me find a PG (Paying Guest House) within walking distance to my office. I set up my double sharing room but was thankful to find that I had no roommates so far, which meant no bathroom sharing and few minutes of extra sleep. It definitely seemed like a good start.
The next morning, I reached office around 10 am, only to find that the team was at some on-site location. Someone who did the accounting showed me around the office, which was a two-storeyed house with living area, kitchen and a couple of rooms. The technology team sat in one of these rooms. I was free by noon and went back to the PG to have lunch. Needless to say, all those horror stories of PGs and the mess are true. The lunch consisted of rice and a water-filled ‘dal’ (lentil soup). It was a relief to know that I wouldn’t have to go through this every day since lunch was provided at the office. The next day seemed to be more exciting as I got to meet everyone on my team, the founders and the rest of the office. I learnt about the vision, the service and the framework and language I was going to code in. Lunch was much better and everyone seemed nice and friendly. There were also evening snacks and tea/coffee around 6 pm. I realized that work hours would be mostly 10 am to 7 pm and already knew that Saturdays were working as well. I went back home, watched some TV, had dinner and went to sleep. Looking back, that was how my day would look like for the next two months. The next couple of days were spent ramping up, understanding some of the services and getting comfortable with Ruby on Rails (a technology framework in Computer Science).
I got my first task very soon and started working on it right away. I won’t go into the technical details of what the task was about and how I solved it. But it was fulfilling to see the work I did being used every day and make things easier for other people. Life soon fell into a pattern – wake up around 8 am or 9 am (depending on how sleepy I was), get ready, grab breakfast from the PG mess, walk to work, do my tasks, have lunch and evening snacks and tea, walk back to the PG, watch some television, eat dinner, study a bit sometimes and sleep. The placement season would start right after my internship ended so I had to prepare for that, which is what the studying was about. Sundays were usually fun days – all about getting lazy, waking up super late and sometimes doing laundry and grocery shopping.
The work experience I had at MGaadi was really helpful to understand how things work in real life, the practical aspect, implications and consequences of code changes and how gratifying it felt to solve a problem that you were stuck on for hours or maybe even days. It made me aware of how different components need to interact together to make everything work seamlessly. It taught me about how important scaling is which is something that I had never considered before in school projects. I also learnt how important it is to be a team player. It was a great experience overall, to learn, first-hand how a start-up works.
Coincidentally, it was also my first experience living outside my house, doing things on my own and pseudo financial independence. It was different from the way that I was living so far. I never had done much grocery shopping before and found that I enjoyed it somewhat. It was fun exploring the city as well. I went to Bannerghatta Biological Park (experience penned here) with a friend where I took a safari ride and visited the zoo. I also did some shopping at the factory outlets to buy gifts for my family with my first salary and that was surreal because I had never been shopping alone. I went to a play arena and did go-karting with friends which was amazing. The area I was living in was Koramangala, which is a food hub filled with cafés and restaurants. I explored a few of them and really enjoyed the food at Truffles which has become really famous in the past few years. The friends I had in Bangalore were all staying far away from Koramangala and this provided me with an opportunity to go and watch a movie by myself. It was a little weird to listen to half an hour of ads in a language I couldn’t understand but apart from that, it was pretty normal. The most unexpected experience from my time in Bangalore was the one when I got sick. I had a throat infection which led to fever and I had to go to a doctor all by myself, then the chemist and take care of myself. There were many firsts for me on this journey, but this was the one that made me realized how privileged I was. It’s been one of those life-changing moments which has made me value family more and not take things for granted.
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