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5 Skills for a Fluid and Successful Internship in India


TIPS - INTERNSHIP IN INDIA


Diplomacy

The quest for compromise is essential in a cultural context where benchmarks are unfamiliar to us. Values are different and the situation and event analysis does not imply the same mechanisms according to the reference culture. Addressing interactions and human relations solely through the prism of one's own culture is the guarantee of evolving in a conflictual and mentally tiring context. On the contrary, it is difficult to comprehensively understand a new culture. It is therefore necessary to swim in unknown waters and as such, diplomacy and the constant search for compromise is the most solid ally. Keep calm, listen attentively to the position of your interlocutor and be able to effectively expose yours without provoking resentment on the other side, all these attitudes will save you a lot of psychic energy and allow you to avoid time-consuming conflicts. The negotiator that you are will have many opportunities to express himself fully.


Curiosity

It seems obvious to mention openness as a determining factor in the success of an internship abroad. It should ideally be the primary motivation behind our desire to work abroad. An internship in a country like India should allow students to discover a new working culture and a new environment of life, but also to take a step back on our home country’s culture. A student who has the will to learn, who regularly asks questions and prepares his or her mind to accommodate new patterns of thought will leave with a certain advantage and optimize the professional outcomes of this type of experience. Curiosity goes hand in hand with analysis skills to push further the positive outcomes of an internship in India.


Flexibility

An internship in India will necessarily lead out of comfort zone and straight to unusual patterns. It must also be taken into account that an internship abroad implies a stay without the physical presence of relatives, usually for several months. The mind is subjected to various tests during the first days, like a muscle to which an unusual physical effort is required: cumulative fatigue during the journey, confrontation with a different environment, discovery of new individuals and thus establishment of social relations, different food and climate, etc ... You must show a certain psychic elasticity to handle these initial tests without it cutting down your morale or making you think of an anticipated return. You must also be able to make decisions in an uncertain context, which will necessarily strengthen your ability to adapt if you take up the challenges open to you.


Proactivity

The ability to take the lead and interact with locals inexorably comes from curiosity. Proactivity, however, goes beyond that because it implies the need to be active and to fight against forms of passivity that can be detrimental to the stay. It will be repeated often during the preparation of the stay and in the adaptation phase on site, tracing the problems encountered is the essential condition of their resolutions. Maintaining a passive attitude is the risk of developing misunderstandings because your interlocutor does not have the same grid for reading events because of its specific culture. What may seem like a norm in our culture is not necessarily in India, and the fact that a person does not react to a problem that you encounter comes in the vast majority of cases because he or she is not conscious of your problem, not because he or she does not give consideration to it. The oral and direct communication is strongly encouraged during your stay in India because it is culturally widespread, even in the field of business.


Patience

This ability is not necessarily instinctive. Of course, students are different in nature and some have a more developed patience than others. But this is not enough to guarantee that patience is applied during the stay in India and in particular in the professional context represented by an internship. A proverb says: "If you come to India with patience, you lose it, if you come without, you acquire it." Patience is indeed an aptitude that takes off from the 3 elements mentioned at the beginning of the article. It requires having the necessary perspective to understand the deadlines imposed on us. It also required a certain capacity of psychic resistance to calmly apprehend new situations. Diplomacy is also a fundamental ally and starting from the perspective of finding the best compromise each time necessarily implies a tendency to develop one's patience.