Inducting next set of tech geeks @Youstart

On the first day of internship, 3 January 2018, we entered the office with a bit of nervousness, a lot of enthusiasm and with eyes full of dreams. After a brief about the company 'Youstart Labs' at Jaipur by Abhishek sir, we were given a brief on all the projects successfully done till now and on the journey of Youstart through the thick and thin.

Post this we were introduced to everyone else there in the Youstart Team members – Abhijeet sir, Sneha mam, Umang sir, Shubham sir, Diljeet sir, Shakti sir and Kuldeep sir along with the other interns- Prashant Pandey, Pallav Bhatnagar, Shreyansh Banthia and me i.e. Pratishtha Sharma who has jotted down this article.

After passing number of subjects and many hurdles, we entered into the final semester of engineering at JECRC University which majorly has internship part.

So various questions were bombarding in our mind like which company to choose, how it would be like working in a firm and many more.

I too had a whole lot of questions crossing my mind such as would we be able to mix up with that environment, where we would be eating the food(yeah! this illogical question also came in our mind), what would be the working hours and days(especially!!), how would we do all the work on our own and so on.

There were the hustle and bustle of everything that would be happening on the first day of my internship.

First, two days were for the intern's orientation program.

Youstart believes that intern's orientation is not just a chore it is the first ever interaction of the new faces with the company and we know that how even small gestures matter a lot as the first impression is the last impression.

Before the orientation, I was in tension. But this orientation program is just to clear our job specifications.

Freshman orientation is a way for students to become familiar with the services of an organization.

It happens with every new intern that they have a very shady and tyrannical image of their boss and seniors, but it is just opposite here at Youstart. The working environment is so "intern friendly" that the burden of the first day seems less and level of enthusiasm is at the peak.

Taking the orientation program further, we were told about some work cultures to be followed and the most important of them is the role of communication for any organization.

The session started with the introduction of some tools used at Youstart, which unifies entire team's communication and makes the workflow a lot better – Slack and Trello.

Instead of waiting for the mentor to come to solve your problem just ping them your issues @ Slack.

Umang sir took our session on Slack that was followed by a session on Trello, taken by Abhijeet sir, another tool that organizes your projects on board, in a glance, it pomps you with what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.

This is not only time saving and a formal way of completing the tasks assigned but is also great at connecting tools and systems we already have.

"Don't worry if you didn't get this", we were told. We were also a bit confused at the start but it is not that a hard nut to crack as it appears to be, once you get hands on these 'formal chat tools'.

The day came to an end with the lessons on how to use GitHub and how to couple it with projects we would be working on and that lesson was commenced by Umang sir and Shubham sir. Though it all seems to be baffling at first, it was not that hard to get hands on it as 'the trick lies in the thought process' and we were determined to make it through.

The following day, we arrived with the same enthusiasm and energy and the day kicked off with the installation of Linux by Aakar and Tabish; past interns from IIT, Jammu; who got the ball rolling. Half of the day went into learning and playing with the codes of Linux.

After the Linux lessons, each intern had a one-on-one meeting with Abhishek sir and Sneha mam who discussed the skill set we have and the technologies we already knew. A mentor was assigned to each one of us, along with the responsibilities and project, we have to try our hands on, from the next day onwards.

This two-day orientation program helped us smoothly making a transition from college to work life. Our mentors helped us understand our roles and job specifications in a better way.

We got to learn many new things in this span of time but we knew we need to work hard and continue our learning curve to contribute something here.