M.B.A. Students Bypassing Wall Street for a Summer in India.
Following is a extract from NY Times articale:
Graduate students from some of the top business schools in the U.S. are vying for internships
at India's biggest private companies.
This summer, Omar Maldonado and Erik Simonsen, both students at the Leonard N. Stern
School of Business at New York University, did something different.
Bypassing internship opportunities on Wall Street, just a subway ride away from their Greenwich Village campus, they went to India to spend the summer at an outsourcing company in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi.
"The India opportunity grabbed me," said Mr. Maldonado, a Boston native.
"I wanted to get a global feel for investment banking and not just a Wall Street perspective."
India can be a jolt to a first-time American visitor. In Gurgaon, a small town despite its tall office complexes and shiny new malls, Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen share an apartment
where the power fails several times a day. Temperatures are regularly above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.
The two men said they came prepared to find inadequate infrastructure,
but were not prepared for the daily frustrations of Gurgaon. There is no mass transportation system, and shopping, even for something as basic as an umbrella, can take hours. They rumble to work in an auto rickshaw - a motorized three-wheeler that seats two and is a ubiquitous form of transport in Indian cities.
But the sophistication of the work being done in Copal's Gurgaon office contrasts with the chaotic city outside. Mr. Simonsen said he was amazed. "I came expecting to see number-crunching and spreadsheet type of work;
I didn't expect American banks to farm out intricate analytics," he said.
The two students are working on a project that analyzes investment opportunities for clients across 23 countries.
Infosys Technologies, the country's second-largest outsourcing firm after Tata Consultancy Services, discovered how popular India had become as an internship destination for Americans when the company began recruiting: for the 40 intern spots at its Bangalore headquarters, the company received 9,000 applications.
Only those with a cumulative grade-point average of 3.6 or more made it to a short list, and
then they were put through two rounds of interviews.
The final 40, who cut a wide academic swathe from engineering schools like M.I.T. and
Carnegie Mellon to business schools like Stanford, Wharton and Kellogg, have since arrived
on campus for average stays of three months. The interns work in areas from marketing to technology.
They live in a 500-room hotel complex on Infosys's expansive campus in the suburbs of Bangalore, exchanging coupons for meals at the food court and riding
the company bus downtown to decompress at the many pubs and bars.
Interns like Mr. Anders are getting a close view of social changes that are happening in India.
Outsourcing has created thousands of better-paying jobs and spawned communities of young
people who can afford cars, apartments and iPods.
"I thought the stipend was the down side," said Mr. Anders, "but coming here is a priceless experience."
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