My four months at G&R
Last year was one of the worst years for most of the people I know, including myself. The only good thing about it came at the end of the year when I got an email about the confirmation of my internship at G&R or Green and Red Technologies Limited. This was the first time I ever tried anything “official” and was therefore very surprised to actually succeed in it.
My area of internship was mobile app development, more specifically Android. Fortunately, at my university they start off teaching codes with Java, which is the base language of Android. So I was very comfortable with it and also, Android Studio did seem fun once I got used to the basic functionalities.
Being a combination of shy, weird and enthusiastic at the same time, I was very confused initially about how this whole journey will go. Because the most people I have come across in life have been stereotypes. They labelled anyone breaking rules and boundaries as “bad”. Understandably, being a follower of the rebellious path, I am not fond of people in general. But luckily, almost all the other interns were just as introvert as me. For the first 2 or 3 weeks there was this weird wall between us, but as soon as it broke, we couldn’t be any happier. It’s not like we became friends overnight or something, but we understood this is a good team to work with, personality-wise.
Also, I am a genuine breed of the sub-species called “lazy” and was therefore pretty doubtful if I can actually do anything right this time. Luckily, this time it was a completely different scenario. I used to come on time and on a regular basis, and now that I look back, I realize that was due to having like-minded and non-egoistic fellow interns. I loved talking to them, spending time with them and of course, laughing at the inside jokes (yes we were lucky to have multiple of those).
Additionally, the office of G&R had a very chilled out atmosphere, so we never felt that much pressure to meet deadlines. We saw the employees play cricket, watch movies and laugh their loudest, and sometimes we stared at each other like “was that…the CEO?” followed by a slow nod and a silent laugh. There were multiple sessions taken by some of the maestros of digital marketing, like Lutfi Chowdhury (Cubex Ltd, Driverbd) and Mr. Rajib (Mindshare), which helped us a lot to have a clear overview about how things work in there.
The journey began with 13 of us interns, divided into 2 teams and of 5 respective areas — back-end development, front-end development, mobile app development, business and growth. Funnily enough, by the end of these 4 months, those 13 came down to 7 and only one team. I personally had no problem with that. Each has their own plans in life, who am I to judge? But as a result of the merging, there were more confusions about who is doing what, how much is already done by the ones who left, if they will contribute any further etc. As a result of all these confusions, our website finally donned the invisibility cloak and left the project. So right now we are trying to make something decent out of the mobile app we are left with.
Our project was basically about introducing a website and a mobile app to keep track of the calories of the users. The specialty of this diet-based project was that, the food stored in the database would include all the local foods of Bangladesh. We would give the user a proper diet plan based on his/her current weight, height, gender and age. It would help keep track of how much the user consumes per day in separate meals and how much s/he loses per day in several physical activities. From these daily information updates, we can tell the user if s/he is going in the right direction of his/her ideal weight or not. Me as a user would want this app to exist because I never found a Bengali-food-friendly diet app in the app store and thus, had to go through many miscalculations about diet plans and ultimately never got the desired result. So this app would help a lot of health-conscious people in the country if we can successfully build it and publish it in future.
In brief, it was a delightful journey with G&R and I look forward to letting my friends and fellow batch mates have the chance to do their internship here too, because it is a good place to start your career.
