MUMBAI, India -- In a role-reversal of sorts, American college students in technical and business fields are applying for internships in India.
Usually, it's the Indian students who are coming to America, but a program offered by fast-growing Indian IT giant Infosys Technologies provides students at MIT, Wharton and other top universities in the U.S. and Europe an opportunity that is hard to match elsewhere.
Infosys' In Step program invites students to work anywhere between one and six months in India on meaningful projects that actually help the firm. Not on dummies created for greenhorns.
For the 2000-2001 school year, 800 students from top American and European colleges applied for just 24 vacancies, most of them in Bangalore. Recruiting for the next year has started, and according to Infosys the number of applications will increase substantially.
"A real-time project is of organizational importance," said In Step's program manager, Aditi Madhok. "It would exist even without the presence of an intern. A dummy project, on the other hand, is not a business imperative. It is specifically created with the aim of keeping an intern busy."
Infosys carefully selects sophomores and final-year students, who it believes "will not mess up real projects." The interns sign confidentiality agreements and are treated very much like employees.
While most companies feel it's safer to give dummies to interns, Alisa Tongg, assistant director in the office of preprofessional advising at MIT, pointed out that students value companies that trust them.
"The students who have the opportunity to accomplish something that contributes value to the employer will be the ones that are proud of their experiences," Tongg said.
Tongg said she is not very familiar with In Step specifically, which reflects Infosys' concern that despite its best efforts, it's difficult for an Indian firm to build a brand name on American campuses.
Other top Indian companies are not very empathetic. Atul Takle of Tata Consultancy Services, which claims to be the largest software firm in Asia, wondered if In Step was really unique.
"TCS, too, has programs that lets students fresh out of American universities work on real-time projects," Takle said. But he admitted that these are recruited employees, and not interns who will go back to college after the brief summer stint. Also, TCS recruits from American and European colleges work in its overseas development centers.
Infosys' attraction, among other things, is the offer to work in India. But now the company is finding the demand so "overwhelming" that next year it plans to accommodate some of the interns in its overseas offices in U.S., Britain and Japan. An intern in India is paid around $300 a month, which will go up to $2,000 for interns placed in North America.
Forty-seven percent of the interns who have been picked up so far were from North America. Seventy-three percent of Infosys' revenue is generated from that region. The rest of the students are from Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, which Infosys considers strong, emerging markets.
Daniel Murillo of Amherst College worked for Infosys in Bangalore for three months in the R&D arm. He said that on his college campus, Infosys stood out "as a unique opportunity among the sea of other consulting and banking firms that hire at Amherst."
After working on developing a methodology for modernizing a certain type of legacy business application for Infosys, "I felt like I was really contributing to the company and wasn't just standing in the sidelines," he said.
Christoph Brandt, from Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany, is in Bangalore doing a project on the impact that the knowledge management system of Infosys has on its productivity.
"Imagine telling someone, I did something for them and they are still using it, or what I did initiated changes in the company," Brandt said. "To have an impact is the best reference you may get."
Also, the relative youthfulness of Infosys employees -- 26 is the average age -- pleases Brandt. In Germany, the average age for employees in similar firms is over 30.
University of Chicago student Smitha Seshari, who is currently working on a branding project for Infosys in Bangalore, said that the offer to work on a real-time project was "a validation of my competence."
Infosys said that since Sept. 11, no intern has cancelled his visit to India.
