INTERN STORIES
Intern Story #15: Atharva’s Community Internship @FrontRow
Atharva is a college dropout interning at FrontRow, which is his first internship experience. He manages the Comedy community at FrontRow.
He is a startup junkie, astrophysics enthusiast, petrolhead, EDM freak, and a tech geek.
Atharva is also working on his side projects and he’s fairly active on Twitter.
Getting hired (Application Process, Interview Experience)
While I was planning to drop out of college around September 2019, I researched a lot about how to begin working towards entrepreneurship.
I was much more naive back then and I used to follow a lot of “romanticized entrepreneurship” content back then. But I was fortunate because I was following Gary Vee and Tim Ferris too, who were the only people who were creating content around genuine stuff. And in one of Gary Vee’s podcast ft. Tim Ferris, both discussed how teenage aspiring entrepreneurs can begin with baby steps towards entrepreneurship.
And the main advice was to start working at a startup. In Gary Vee’s words, eat shit, live with 5 roommates, just do the grind
Won’t talk about my dropout story here. Fast forward to June 2020, I saw Abhay Jani’s tweet about internship opportunities at FrontRow and I applied for it. I sent a mail to the HR team of FrontRow and got selected for the next round where I was interviewed and questions related to community management were asked to me.
I had some experience with growing a “Get-Rich-Quick Digital Marketing” Facebook group for a digital marketer/YouTuber based off of London. I cleared the round and gave the second round, which I cleared too!
Day in the life as an intern and learnings
I was really clueless about the staff and team members in the beginning, but after my little life experience, I knew I’ll get to know everything slowly if I go with the flow for a while.
I was blown away by the Flat Hierarchy structure of the work culture at FrontRow.
Slowly I got to know about my work, role, and responsibilities and I started managing the comedy community.
If I compare my day in the life as an intern over a few months, no two weeks were the same. I always got to work on something new which kept me excited about work throughout. I got to know about startups and how one works, from the inside.
As the comedy community grew larger over time, and we shifted from Facebook group to FrontRow’s own app, I got to learn many things about Product Management too. It was really exciting to get to know a commercial scale app’s mechanism from behind the scenes.
I also got to work with a really awesome and ambitious bunch of people. FrontRow team always supported me in the lows and highs. The team is also helping and supporting a fellow intern while he’s building his own startup. After a long time, I’ve found a place where I feel I belong to.
Advice to aspiring interns
I’ve interacted with many teenage inspiring interns through Twitter, and from those observations, I’d like to answer the FAQs:
Q. Why will someone hire a college-going teenager with no past work experience?
Ans. Talking specifically about startups, startups want someone ambitious who can share their vision with them. And startups do hire college-going teenagers as a wide range of roles is needed to function.
Q. I was rejected at a startup for an internship opportunity, am I not good enough?
Ans. As I said, startups want their team members to share their vision, and if you get rejected, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not capable, it’s just that you’re an apple trying to find your place on an orange farm. Find the place where you fit well, find your apple farm. Keep trying.
Q. I’m afraid of getting rejected, why should I keep applying for my first internship? I’ll apply only when I find my perfect startup.
Ans. You won’t ever find your “perfect startup” if you don’t try a bunch of things. Also, every time you are rejected, you get to learn what not to do and how not to approach a startup, which can massively help you get an internship role at your ideal/dream startup/company.
Q. I don’t have any specific skills, why will someone hire me?
Ans. When a startup’s job post says “ideally for college students”, they usually mean that they need a generalist. Many kids think that they’re looking for specific skills. Instead, they’re looking for peeps who are ambitious and driven enough to share the vision with the startup.
If you think I can help you out with anything, my DMs are open on Twitter.
