Ajinkya Bedekar of NIIT University’s B.Tech. CSE is dabbling with AI, ML and NLP in his Industry Practice with IBM

When most students get an opportunity to intern with an International giant like IBM, you expect them to be thrilled to bits. That’s why Ajinkya Bedekar’s response surprised us with its unusually assured perspective. “By hiring interns from NIIT University, IBM gained employees with sound technical knowledge who can work on different projects. The organization can work on other projects parallelly, offering satisfactory results to clients,” says the NIIT University student. For the Data Science Intern, the handsome stipend of Rs. 30,000 a month is just a bonus. He knows not only what he is set to gain from the internship but also what he brings to the organization.

It’s refreshing to hear Ajinkya’s unique perspective, which is confident but not cocky. He continues, “Look, working as Data Science Intern at IBM is a dream for most of the Computer Science students with interest in Data Science or Artificial Intelligence. And this cannot be achieved without the help of university.” In his final semester now, Ajinkya has done three internships before this, but calls his current Industry Practice the best experience so far. According to him, other run-of-mill internships that engineers get are mainly in the training sessions. But he has got the chance to work on real-life projects with International clients.

Ajinkya believes the internship offers him the opportunity to try out new things, gain exposure and bolster his resume. With a lot at stake for an internship that has much to offer, it wasn’t surprising that Ajinkya and his batch mates had to go through a rigorous six stage selection process. “The initial screening was followed by Cognitive Ability Test also known as IBM Cognify. It consists of 6-7 computer games, which assess critical attributes like problem solving, numerical reasoning and verbal knowledge. Then there was Psychometric test, Coding test on Hackerrank platform followed by English language test,” he explains in detail.

Candidates like Ajinkya had to finally go through Technical Interview and HR Interview rounds that tested their domain knowledge as well as soft skills. He made it through and was quite prepared to handle the challenges in the professional sphere. He tells us that he was familiar with most aspects that were required as he had learnt them while working on projects for different courses at NIIT U. “We are working on different projects in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. I am excited about working on real life projects developing software based on specific requirements of clients,” he says.

But an Industry Practice of this magnitude brings its set of challenges as well. Ajinkya asserts that these challenges have pushed him to think quickly on his feet and improvise. He narrates an incident when he was working on a project that required him to segregate the clauses and give the compliance result. “We did not have enough data provided by the client and had to work with what we had. I had to think on my feet to solve the problem. Developing a Machine Learning model with good accuracy on limited dataset is quite difficult,” he reveals. And these are just the skills and experiences that will benefit him as a future professional.