My Internship Experience at Grabhouse

This is the story of a month. Not just a regular month, but thirty days filled with happiness, emotions, tears and more happiness. Oh, and a lot of food. My internship story is about my experiences at a well-established real estate brokerage website in Bangalore called Grabhouse and it’s quite the roller-coaster ride, so you might want to grab a drink and strap on a seat belt to your chair before you start reading this.

The internship aside, I barely even knew the company existed before my friend told me about this 24-hour hackathon that they were conducting a few months ago. Even then, I was extremely reluctant to go as that would have been my very first hackathon in my life, and you know what they say, you never forget your first. *wink wink*. So I thought long and hard about this one, whether I should attend or just skip the opportunity and let it pass like I had done for the most part of my life. The latter sounded safe, but something came over me the night before the hackathon, something that forced me to register at last minute, on the very dot of the last hour before registrations closed.

Thanks to BSNL, and the ‘wonderful’ internet services that they provide, I was kicked off the grid for the remainder of the hour, making me kiss my chances of attending the hackathon goodbye, but in all shock and awe, my friends call me at the last second and somehow get me registered under their team, and once again, I was back in the game. Given the last minute surprise, it really gave me a good feeling about the competition and I couldn’t even sleep the day before. I stayed up all night memorizing the Android Developers Documentation and running through basic principles of UI and UX Design, trying to make myself sound not as dumb as I look for tomorrow.

The hackathon day arrived and me and my friends rushed into the office located in Koramangala, just opposite to Forum Mall, once the first and most prestigious mall in the Silicon City of India. We gazed out the windows and glared inside the white cubicles that were not fully covering the face when one sits in them, so as to keep a friendly and humane environment. It felt nice that they still cared about human interactions, contrary to what I’ve always heard from friends working at corporate. Entering the huge room we were about to be stuck into for the remainder of the hackathon, we caught one of the really cool looking cubicles with a bean bag inside, which we soon started fighting for as if it were Iran Kashmir Kaveri River … I give up. (Political correctness can get the best of a writer, … fearing you might offend an unknown radical somewhere is tiring)

I’m going to skip on the details of the hackathon since that isn’t exactly what the Internship Story is about, but in a nutshell, we created an app that would remove the need for a physical key or the owner to be present in the premises while an Open House is being shown. Instead, we digitized the process by allowing the owner to issue a digital one-time key that could open locks using NFC Technology. It was beautifully designed, if I could say so myself, and while we didn’t win the first prize, the judges definitely liked our app enough to give the designer of the application, who’s yours truly, a job offer in the company.

Since I was just a student, and still am, I decided to just ask if they could offer an internship during my winter break, and they were more than happy to oblige and offer me one with a small interview, where they reviewed my design and gave me some constructive criticism on the app we built. We left the office almost 48 hours later, after the prize distribution ceremony, after the individual interviews and after the insane amounts of food that we ravaged through, we went back home for a good 2 days’ worth of sleep.

The hackathon was in the month of November or so, and the internship was offered for the month of January, when we had our winter holidays at college. It was to ring in the New Year with a bang, and boy, did it ring. The original plan was that my friend would be interning along with me, but at last minute, lot more surprises came afoot and it came to a situation where in I was the only one selected for the internship. I was almost about to reject it, given that I was a bit afraid being there for a month on my own. It felt like joining Engineering all over again, but this time, I knew the process would eventually end up being worthy of my time.

I puckered up, sucked in my gut, accepted the Internship Offer and started taking the long traffic-ridden Silk Board commute to and from work every day. In the beginning, it all felt like a fairy tale, and why I say this, is because of the first few days of how I fell in love with the work culture and environment of the office. It felt wrong to even call it a corporate office of such a huge company. Everywhere I saw, there were colorful artworks put up, some motivational posters, some not-so-offensive one liners here and there. My eyes couldn’t stop wandering, looking here and there, crazy patterns running through the office floor and ceiling. One could go on and on about the architecture of the place, but then again, that is for yet another competition at yet another time.

When the HR came to speak to me, she was the sweetest lady I had ever met, contrary to what many people consider HR managers to be like. The welcoming was a smooth process and I was introduced to each and every one in the office on the very first day, and while I was the youngest and dumbest person in the room full of talented, experienced and young-but-not-as-young individuals, every employee there invited me with open arms and made me feel at home.

The first day ended quickly, with the introduction of myself and the whole staff of 60 people, the issuing of my workstation for the remainder of the month and most of all, a tour of the pantry and cafeteria. Little did I know, the cafeteria was going to be the place I spent most of my time at, and before you jump into any conclusions, no, I didn’t have to get coffee for any of the employees working there, but I did it anyway because we grew on to become friends.

I got to work on exciting technologies the very first week, ranging from JavaScript Web Development to Python Bot Automation, and even dabbled in PHP Frameworks for a week or two. I worked on everything that they asked me to, even if I didn’t know it, I used to take my time to get used to it and try my hand at it anyway. Also, they used to give me plenty of freedom to work on projects that I was interested to do personally as well. Something that you don’t see everyday in a company or even few startups for that matter.

To keep the body fit, they used to conduct contests in the office that had employees hit the gym every day and the person who used to work out at least once every day, used to win some goodies. Needless to say, being the intern, I felt like I needed to take as much opportunities as I can get out of the one month that I was going to be there, so I hit the gym every single day, running to the tunes of Coldplay and Linkin Park and the occasional Bollywood Mix. One month later, guess who won a T-Shirt that doesn’t even fit him after all that exercise? It’s this guy (points at self).

Although, it wasn’t for the T-Shirt, it wasn’t even for the exercise, it was just for the fun of experiencing new things and things that I wouldn’t be able to do after a month. That motivated me to do a lot of other crazy things in my one month at Grabhouse. I used to spend quite some time at the pool table and table tennis court as well, where I used to challenge all the other employees working there. I wasn’t good at it at first, but spending a fair amount of time at anything can get you to a pretty decent level. Unfortunately for me, I just got a lot worse. Given that this was all in the first few weeks, I was allowed to utilize my time in activities like these because I hadn’t been assigned any major work as of yet, and I wanted to take advantage of it as much as possible.

I am someone who loved what he did. I spent my month at Grabhouse doing projects that I never even thought about before, working on languages I hadn’t even heard of before and spending time with people I hadn’t even met before. Even though I was an intern, there was a moment when I was knee deep in working on something new, that I left office at an ungodly hour of 1 AM. Despite what people may say, that day was the happiest and most memorable of my life. There is a certain pride that you feel when you work with your colleagues at late night with a sense of camaraderie. I got mean looks from my dad once I eventually came home, but it was all worth it.

It had been almost close to one month, and the workload was getting a bit heftier. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but it didn’t give me enough time to hit the gym, but then again, losing 2 kgs was an accomplishment enough. It was time for me to gain them back, which I did in record time. I couldn’t fathom the fact that there were only a few more days to go and I had to go back to college. Every single day at office, I used to remind and get reminded that I have only few more days. My colleagues, and now friends, used to tease me about it, but they knew it was eventually going to happen.

The final day of my internship was shared by another colleague. The CTO of Grabhouse, it was his last day working there as well, after a long number of years with them. And so, we all went to the nearby bar and got our drinks on. (I didn’t drink, still underage at the time… but it was still fun to watch them go haywire!). We went out on the balcony later, stood on the balcony in an ill-shaped circle and started going around, talking about the stories they had with us. It was one of those movie-like moments I would never forget.

There’s something that has to be said about startups like these, that they just make you fall in love with your work first, before they ask you to work. They are doing it right by me, and honestly, that one month was as efficient as all my hackathon nights put together. This experience I had ruined me for the corporate world, and now when I go back to college, I announce right away that I won’t be sitting for placements… but instead, I want to venture out into the startup world and discover more of such unique and adventurous experiences.

They say never love your workplace, but I was too young and naïve to listen to them. I ended up loving every single memory of that place, from the coffee machine, to the evening samosas, from the high-speed internet, to the slow motion flashbacks I have of my time there. My month at Grabhouse wasn’t an ordinary month, it was the best internship I had ever taken up in my entire life, and even though there hasn’t been a lot of experience on my end, I can stand taller and happier in front of the people who are close to me again, now that I had this story to back me up.