This infographic was created by Unum UK.

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Since 2011, Facebook has been operating a Bug Bounty Program, where it encourages people around the world to discover security vulnerabilities in their services (Instagram, Internet.org, Moves, Oculus, Onavo, Open source projects by Facebook/Parse, etc.) or infrastructure which creates a security or privacy risk, in exchange for a generous reward, depending on the extent of your bug report.

According to Facebook, they have received  2,400+ valid submissions and awarded more than $4.3 million to 800+ researchers around the world, since the inception of Bug Bounty Program.

The recent recipient of $10,000 from Facebook, is a 10-year old Finnish boy – Jani, who found an API vulnerability on Instagram, which allowed users to delete the comments of any other user on the Website. This loophole was discovered in a private Programming application interface, that wasn’t checking if the person deleting the comment, was the same person who posted the comment in question.

“I would have been able to eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber, comments from there,” Jani told iltalehti.

According to a spokesperson from Facebook, this bug was fixed in February, after they received a report from Jani, and for his efforts he was granted a sum of USD 10,000 – an amount higher than what is generally paid to Facebook Bounty Hunters, due to the scope of risk involved. Jani ntends to spend the money on new soccer gear, a computer, and bicycle, to share with his twin brother.

Jani’s father who is quite surprised on his discovery, stated that the brothers spent considerable amount of time on Youtube, watching videos related to Network Security.

Since he is 10, and the minimum age requirement to register on Instagram is 13, Jani was told to create a fake account on the Website, to run the team at Facebook, through the vulnerability that he had spotted.

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1. Meena Bindra, Biba:
Meena Bindra, is the Chairperson and Founder of her much known brand, Biba.

The brand, with 150 exclusive outlets as of June 2014 (As per Forbes) started when a bored house wife, also a mother of two, took to designing as a hobby soon, and soon converted the same into a Business, with an initial investment of Rs. 8000, in the 1980s.

Initially her customers were friends and relatives, but once she realised that fashion was her forte, she took to designing on a commercial level. As her Business flourished, Meera managed Marketing of the brand, handled the Sales, and strategized expansion, all by herself. Her first big break was when Benzer, Mumbai‘s famous fashion store was stocking Indian womens’ wear and she was given the opportunity to to move her product out of home. This is when, and how Biba was born.

Meera opened her first exclusive store in Mumbai Inorbit Mall in the early nineties. She took to this Business when readymade Churidar and Kurta was unheard of and getting the fabric for the same also required tremendous amount of effort. This proved to be of a great advantage to her.

Since then it has been a good journey for Biba, with an approximate annual turnover of 600 crores today.

BIBA won the Best Women’s Ethnic Wear Brand of the Year at the CMAI Apex Awards last year. In 2012 it also won the Images Award for Most Admired Women’s Indian wear Brand of the Year.

2. Nina Lekhi, Baggit:
“Every failure is not a failure” ~ who knows this better than Nina Lekhi, Founder Baggit.

A bright student through out and always the teacher’s favourite could not believe her fate when she failed to clear her first year at the Sophia Polytechnic College in Mumbai. After 2 months of the exam, Lekhi decided that she needed to prove herself again. While she was permitted to take her exams again, but was not allowed to sit for classes. In the one year of spare time, she took various other classes, started designing bags and selling them at Rs. 65 back in 1985.

As a ‘Sales Girl’ during the holidays, Nina convinced her boss to display her bags, interned with  Shyam Ahuja – a big name in floor decor, and 5 years later INXS – a store for Baggit merchandise opened at at Kemps Corner. Lekhi‘s brand Baggit (a name born of Michael Jackson’s song – Beat it) is now a 10 crore Business that has diversified into belts, laptop cases, caps and scarves.

In its first year of Business, Baggit made a profit of 50,000. It was in mid-1991, that Baggit touched the million mark.

Mother to a 14-year-old daughter, Lekhi also runs a school along with her husband, known as Rishi Gurukulam at Katarkhdak Hills, on the outskirts of Pune.

3. Shruti Chaturvedi, Chaaipani-
India’s fastest growing media platform to discover and share stories – Chaaipaani, was founded by Shruti Chaturvedi in 2015.

A graduate from Xavier’s Ahmedabad(Psychology) and a university topper, Shruti, prior to Chaaipani, interned with  AIESEC and Coca-Cola and was also the first runner up in the Myntra blog contest in June 2015.

Initially taking up blogging as a hobby for one year and returning back to the cliche life of Graduation-Job-Marriage-Children, fate had different plans for Shruti, as Chaaipani – a one year old project came to be a well known platform for sharing inspirational and positive-vibed stories of people who are making our world a better place to live in.

In a short span of time, Chaaipani has featured more than 300 articles. Their vision is simple: To bring attention to the most important stories in the world.

4. Ria Sharma, Make Love Not Scars:
Ria Sharma, a student at the Leeds College of Arts, United Kingdom returned to India during her third year and made a documentary on acid attack survivors. In the process of creating the documentary, she met several survivors and their stories touched her and inspired her to help them in way bigger than what she was already doing.

Subsequently, she founded Make Love Not Scars, an NGO working towards providing help and support to acid attacks victims in India. The organization not only aims at providing medical and legal assistance to the victims, but also helps them to resume and regain their life.

The services provided by MLNS include; Contacting survivors and family, Assessing financial situation, Assisting with legal affairs, Assisting with medical paperwork, Psychological and Moral support for survivor and family, Social skills assistance, Social media connection via blog and Facebook for each survivor, Government support via campaigns, Crowd sourcing for financial support, Education for survivors etc.

She claims to have found her calling at a young age and hopes that her efforts will one day contribute towards making a change. Ria frequently writes for various online blogs and her work has also been featured in the Times Of India. An outspoken young individual, Ria is quick to voice her opinion on social issues.

5. Falak Randerian, My Little Chatterbox:
My little Chatterbox, founded by Falak Randerian, is one of the unique ventures that aims to help children develop healthy reading habits.

Randerian is a Post Graduate in Communication, an experienced Phonics Trainer, a Trained Storyteller, a natural with children and a Parenting Blogger. She founded “My little Chatterbox” at the age of 30 and hasn’t turned back since.  It is a club which believes in creating a lifelong association with reading, and books.  It does so in various ways, be it The Reading Room – where their Book clubs, Phonics workshops, and communication sessions take place; or the Tale in a Mail, which is a one-of-its-kind monthly subscription box of hand-picked books for children between 0-6 years of age.

If you are a woman entrepreneur, or know one, share your story with us at blog@letsintern.com

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1. Warm Welcome:
On my first day, Lisa Moreno(former Executive Assistant to CEO and CTO/Office Manager) welcomed me to the office with her big friendly smile. I was given a set of keys to all doors in the office and a new hire packet with some paperwork to fill out.  All this happened really painlessly and I got my first paystub within a week.

2. Development Setup:
At Quora, you’re given your equipment of choice, which you can pick ahead of time.  Most of the engineers go for the 13″ Macbook Pro, with an external 30″ monitor, ergonomic keyboard, and ergonomic chair.  Here’s a shot of my desk after everything was set up.

One thing you’ll notice is that Quora doesn’t really give its employees any desktops.  Instead, all development is done in the cloud with Amazon EC2 instances, provisioned specifically with custom software scripts.  This approach improves productivity, flexibility, organizational scalability with lots of other benefits, at the expense of a little latency and speed.  But with EC2, large high-compute instances are spun up to be shared among the team when, ahem, needed.

I got to work with my favorite IDE & text editor — Vim (text editor), and I was sure to update the internal tally we keep just for fun. Currently, Team Emacs(captained by Adam D’Angelo, Founder and CEO, Quora) is leading Team Vim (text editor) (by Charlie Cheever, Co-founder, Quora) 11 to 4. And team TextMate is still on the bleachers. For experts and beginners alike, preconfigured configuration files and instructions are provided for you to get up and running with navigating/tab-completing the Quora codebase.

3. Free Meals:
Quora sponsors your lunch everyday, and dinners occasionally. Instead of a single shared catering menu, you get to pick what you want on Waiter.com in advance and the food is brought to the conference room by 12:30pm each day.

Here’s my lunch with a subset of the team on my first day. (Typically it’ll be whoever is actually in the office over noon.)

4. Accessing Corp:
Once I had my development environment set up, I had access to the internal Quora instance, known as Corp.  As you can guess, the company’s persistent knowledge base is powered by the same Quora engine running onwww.quora.com.  You can ask it specific questions, and find your answers.  Or you could ask someone to answer. I spent the afternoon ramping up on all the content that was already been populated by others.

5. Introduction to Engineering:
I then set up meetings with Kevin Der(Quora Engineer) and Albert Sheu(Quora Engineer) to give me a rundown on the current Quora architecture and deployment process.  For approximately 98% of you, once you start, be prepared to be mind-blown, even more than what you’ve seen, heard or read about so far.  There is way more tech under the hood than publicly made known, and especially as Quora starts to do more interesting stuff with Big Data and Machine Learning.

Everyone was also incredibly accessible in the company to help me ramp up.  Even though I had an informal mentor, I was able to ask anyone for help over IM or in person.  Having old friends like Tracy Chou(former Quora Engineer) and Belinda Gu there also helped lots!

6. Introduction to Product Design:
Rebekah Cox(Quora Advisor) sets up this meeting with new hires every few weeks, where she covers some of the Design philosophies and processes. Through that, I learnt about how Quora functions, and the interaction between the Product Designers and Engineers in the company.

By the end of the first week, new engineers and designers will already be working together on a daily basis, reviewing each other’s code and getting new stuff out the door.

7. Free Yoga:
Quora sponsors a weekly yoga session for its employees. I haven’t experienced the benefits of yoga before, and it was fun the join the rest of the team for my first yoga session.

8. 1:1 With Your Manager
At Quora, you have regular 1:1s with your manager, starting from your very first day. There is plenty of direct mentorship and peer feedback sessions to improve yourself and expand your boundaries. At my first 1:1, I found out how best to match my interests among all the work Quora had, and let my manager know what I would like to work on first.

10. First Push:
By the end of the day, I was ready and itching to get something out to production.  Besides updating the highly watched Team Bios page, I was given a couple of small bugs and tasks to get familiar with contributing to the codebase.  A single git push later, I celebrated my first easy commit through Quora’s continuous deployment infrastructure!  (And only after all that, was my code truly reviewed.)

11. Miscellaneous Startup Fun:
In between development, and oh, actually having a legitimate excuse to Quora at work, I joined the rest of the team watching Youtube videos ad-hoc on Big Board, an in-house status dashboard powered, too, by LiveNode and webnode2:

By adding songs to this custom video playlist shuffler (recognize anything?)

And also laughing at code artifacts like this below ^^:

At the end of the day, I got to pick up cool employee swag to show off to friends that I’d just joined one of the coolest places to work for.

This post was written by Kay Seng Tay(Director of Engineering) on Quora here. 

The post Starting work at Quora | 11 things I got on my first day as a Quora employee! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

This post has been adapted from this answer on Quora, written by Dolly Singh.
After working for Elon for over 5 years at SpaceX as the Head of Talent Acquisition, there are many potential answers to this question.  Any answer I might give will be completely colored by my own experiences, so full disclaimer this is not an unbiased piece free of personal narrative.

It is said that you cannot dream yourself a character; you must hammer and forge one yourself. If any leader and any company has done that, and continues to do that it is SpaceX.  To try and capture in words what working with Elon is like, I’d like to share some specific memories, particularly of one really rough day and its epic aftermath.

On Aug 2 2008, 8 months after I joined the company, SpaceX launched its third flight of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle.  Falcon 1 was the predecessor to the Falcon 9 launch vehicles that the company flies today.

It was a defining moment for the company. Elon had a couple years prior stated in the press that his $100M personal investment in the company would get us up to 3 tries and if we couldn’t be successful by the third flight we may have to admit defeat.  In addition to the pressure created by this narrative in the press, the lobbyist armies of our competitors  (largest, most powerful defense contractors in the world) had been in overdrive in DC trying to undermine SpaceX and damage our credibility by painting us as too risky and inexperienced in order to protect their multi-billion dollar interests in the space launch Business.
SpaceX executed a picture perfect flight of the first stage (portion of the flight that gets the vehicle away from Earth’s gravity and where the vehicle experiences max Q/maximum dynamic pressure, or basically where the conditions on the vehicle are physically the harshest) clearing some of the highest risk points of mission.

However, shortly after the first stage flight, immediately following stage separation (when the first stage of the vehicle detaches and falls away from the 2nd stage of the vehicle which continues its journey to space) we lost the vehicle and mission.

SpaceX, VP of Propulsion Tom Mueller, the modern day godfather of rocket science and one of the most brilliant scientific minds on the planet, and his team had done such a great job redesigning the vehicles engines systems that they were even more efficient and powerful than in some ways projected.

We turned off the first stage engine, and then proceeded to separate the vehicle stages; however when the stages uncoupled there was still a little leftover ‘kick’ or thrust in the first stage engine- so our first stage literally rear ended our second stage immediately after we had tried to separate the two sections of the vehicle. It was a devastating emotional experience.

I stood around with the then 350 or so employees, and we cheered the vehicle on as it took off, and as we were watching the mission clock and knew that the stages were about to separate – the video feed was cut.  The company is on a 20 second viewing delay from the mission control team as we are being projected the external press feed which is delayed in case of major mission anomalies.  So when we lost video, we knew something had gone  wrong in a big way.

Elon and about 7-8 of the most senior technical people at SpaceX were commanding the mission from a trailer in the back of the Hawthorne factory; and we all waited anxiously for the trailer door to open and for someone to tell us something.  The mood in the building hung thick with despair; you have to keep in mind that by this point SpaceX was 6 years old, and many people have been working 70-80+ hours a week, swimming against extremely powerful currents, like difficult  barriers in Technology, institution, politics, and Finance- by sheer force of their blood and sweat.

They had all given so much, were mentally and physically exhausted, and really needed a win in order to replenish their spiritual wells and give them the faith to keep following this man up a treacherous mountain that had depleted the hopes and resources of the many others who had come to conquer it.

This night would forever impact the future of the company, it had the potential to send the company into a downward spiral, from which we may not have ever recovered. A failure in leadership would have destroyed us not only from the eyes of the press or potential consumers but it would have destroyed us internally.

When Elon came out he walked past the press and first addressed the company. Although his exact words escape me in how he started off, the essence of his comments were that:

• We knew this was going to be hard, it is after all rocket science;  then listed the half dozen or so countries who had failed to even successfully execute a first stage flight and get to outer space, a feat we had accomplished successfully that day.
• Elon has (in his infinite wisdom) prepared for the possibility of an issue with the flight by taking on a significant investment (from Draper Fisher Jurvetson if I recall correctly)  providing SpaceX with ample financial resources to attempt 2 more launches; giving us security until at least flight 5 if needed.
• And that we need to pick ourselves up, and dust ourselves off, because we have a lot of work to do.  Then he said, with as much fortitude and ferocity as he could muster after having been awake for like 20+ hours by this point that, “”For my part, I will never give up and I mean never,” and that if we stick with him, we will win.

I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that.  It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.  Within moments the energy of the building went from despair and defeat to a massive buzz of determination as people began to focus on moving forward instead of looking back. This shift happened collectively, across all 300+ people in a matter of not more than 5 seconds. I wish I had video footage as I would love to analyze the shifts in body language that occurred over those 5 seconds. It was an unbelievably powerful experience.

What happened in the days and weeks following that night is nothing short of a series of miracles:

• Within a matter of hours the SpaceX team identified the likely cause of the launch failure. Typically turnaround time from others in the launch Business can range from weeks to months for failure investigations. Our team combed through every ounce of data to make sure we understood exactly what went wrong as quickly as possible.
• By Aug 6th we announced the results of our investigation and came 100% clean with our supporters and customer community in order to make sure we could retain their trust in this difficult time. (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation)
• In 7 weeks, we had another rocket fully manufactured, integrated and on location ready to fly again. No one else could have done this in less than 6 months with unlimited human and financial resources; SpaceX did it in 6 weeks, with less than 400 people and on a restricted financial diet.
• On Sept 28 2008, SpaceX flew its Falcon 1 launch vehicle from Kwajalein Atoll in the south pacific and executed its first 100% successful launch becoming the world’s first privately built rocket to achieve earth orbit.  An accomplishment of truly epic portions and a task previously completed by only 6 mightiest nations in the history of the world.  A much needed and much deserved victory for the entire SpaceX team and as it hopefully will turn out the future of humanity overall.

So for those who ask the question, this is in my opinion the true character of Elon Musk. Undeterred in the face of all odds, undaunted by the fear of failure, and forged in the battlefields of some of the most terrifyingly technical, and capital intensive challenges that any human being could choose to take on.  Somehow he comes out alive, every time – with the other guy’s head on a platter.

Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him. He pushes himself harder and harder and he pushes others around him the exact same way. The challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren’t. So if you work for Elon you have to accept the discomfort. But in that discomfort is the kind of growth you can’t get anywhere else, and worth every ounce of blood and sweat.

The post What is it like to work with Elon Musk? | Former Head of Talent Acquisiton at SpaceX, shares her experience. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

“Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.” – Horace Greeley

Something probably all journalists will agree to. Fourteen years into the profession –  Special correspondent at Times of India, Rachna Singh can not imagine herself in any other profession but Journalism. Here is her story.

A brief introduction.
After a Masters in English Literature I tried my hand at various professions. I began with an administrative post with a leading corporate house, didn’t like it. Then switched over to Confederation of Indian Industry, however, that too lasted only for two years. Post that, for a few years I tried my hand at landscaping. While I was doing that I also started freelance work thus writing for magazines: Golf Digest, Inside Outside and Society Interiors among others. It was during this time that I found my calling and simultaneously took up a course in ‘Journalism and News Writing’ at the London School of Journalism.

Where did you see yourself 10 years from the date of joining?
The question, ”Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?” was never relevant to me.  For me it was always “take one step at a time and put your best foot forward!”

I applied for a job with the Times of India. Today I have been in this profession for the past 14 years and time has just flown past. I loved my job and still love every moment as a journalist.

What was your interview process like?
Per se, 14 years back we didn’t really have such rigorous procedures over job interviews. I still remember, I walked into the editor’s office with my credentials. After just a cursory look, he asked me to take up an feature writing assignment and revert when I was ready with it. I got back to office after profiling a leading political personality. The editor read through it. “When can you join?” he asked and I was overjoyed. I remember having said, “Right now!”

How different was the profession from your expectations?
I really didn’t know what to expect from the profession when I joined. But soon enough, it was like quicksand. Each day was a new beginning, Very absorbing and absolutely fascinating. Beginning with few articles a week, I was soon anchoring four feature pages per week. Unlike other professions, I had the liberty for flexible working, as long as I stuck to the deadlines. But even in journalism a lot has changed. Till few years back journalism revolved around telling the truth and putting the devil to shame. It’s a bit disappointing, but that is not so now.

What kind of difficulties do you face in your profession?
I wouldn’t call them difficulties. Each day is new and you are learning all the time. I think my job has helped me evolve as an individual and a human being. I owe all that I am today not to any individual but to my profession.

One positive and one negative of your job?
Positive: I love my job. Negative: I love my job. Think what you want.

How do you think the profession has change in the past 10 years? And how do you think it’ll evolve in the coming years?
Journalism has changed tremendously over the last 10 years. Earlier print media was only limited to print, but now we have to focus equally on the digital. And not just news feeds but online stories, tweets and online updates. We have to keep updating on social media sites, several of them including Twitter and Facebook.

I really don’t know where we are headed with Technology but the coming generations, I guess, will live in cyber space.

Word of Advice?
No sermons. Find your calling, be sure of it and just jump in the cauldron. What you love doing will never burn you out. But if it still does- then jump out. What the heck? There is much more to life. Try something else. But in the end be sure to master whatever you do and be happy!

The post In conversation with Rachna Singh, Special correspondent at Times of India, on her 14 year career in journalism. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

“I did expect I would make it to the list because my exams went well, but number 1 – that’s something that I would call the stuff of dreams.”

Tina Dabi is the talk of the country for having topped the Union Public Service Commission exam. The cherry on the cake is that this was her first attempt at the exam.

The 22 year old is an alumnus of Lady Shri Ram College, ranked second in the county for commerce, graduated in Political Science. Prior to this she completed her schooling from Jesus and Mary convent opting for Humanities.

Here are some things you didn’t know about this young achiever-

1. Hailing from Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, Tine moved to Delhi with her family when he was in Class 7. At present, her father works at the Department of Telecom, her mother is an Engineer, and she also has a younger sister who completed her schooling this year.

2. She not only topper the UPSC exam but has been an over achiever in everything she has taken to. She was the topper of her CBSE 12th exam and graduated top of her class at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi, where she studied political science, which was also the optional subject of her exam. Not to mention, this was her first attempt at cracking UPSC.

3. She has always been recognized as a top notch orator since her school days, with keen interest in Indian politics and Constituition of India. Tina was the Vice Speaker at the 2012 event – Youth Parliament.

4. While listing her preference of service the order was as follows. IAS ( Indian Administrative Services) > IPS (Indian Police Services) > IRS;IT ( Indian Revenue Services, Income Tax)  > IRS;CE ( Indian Revenue Services, Customs and Central Excise)

5. The cadre opted by Dabi is Haryana. When asked why, she stated “The state of Haryana is always known from its patriarchal mindset and the gender inequality. It has always disturbed me. I belong to a modern and progressive family so there is no space for gender inequality at least in my life. I want to change the orthodox tag from the state Haryana and I would feel great if I make any positive changes in the state.”

6. Her extra curricular achievements include:

• University gold medal-political science.
• University topper-academic year.
• Best all round student award.

7. Her hobbies include painting (Madhubani art), travelling, playing, singing, basketball, playing guitar, photography and reading Jane Austen.

8. On being asked about how she came to take the exam, she accepted that her parents only made her realize the importance of being a civil servant. Seeing all the requisite qualities of a bureaucrat in her, her parents motivated her to prepare for IAS exam when she was in school only. She had opted for humanities in her plus two, CBSE board.

9. The key to her success, according to her is,”Patience”. “Sometimes there comes a time when you feel lonely and depressed because this is such a difficult exam and a long process. Other parts of your life become almost non-existent, so patience I think is also key,” she said.

10. She studied for 8 to 10 hours a day and gives the credit for her success to “strategy and planning”, placing emphasis on “having a schedule, weekly targets, and being disciplined and focused”.

11. The youngster gives most of the credit for her results to her mother, stating, “I’ve never seen anyone give up so much, make so many sacrifices, to fulfill my dreams. She is my role model. I’ve never seen anyone more humble, honest, sincere or hard working.

There are a number of people congratulating her o, including some prominent personalities such as Narendra Modi,  Arvind Kejriwal, Udit Raj (Northwest Delhi MP and Dalit leader)

The post 11 things you should know about Tina Dabi, the 22-year old UPSC 2015 topper. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

I interned at Google’s San Francisco Office during Summer 2015. Working for Google was like a dream come true for me. I worked with the cloud datastore team to create a sample application that demonstrates the best practices to use datastore. Here’s how I got to where I am:

1. Good Grades – Yes, I was able to get attention because of good grades. It made my resume worth looking at.

2. Awareness – Many good programmers that I know, don’t even know about the career opportunities available. They take whatever they get. They do not try to get better offers. So being aware helped me a lot. I interviewed with multiple organisations which prepared me for more important interviews.

3. Contact with Seniors - Having a good relationship with all the great programmers in my senior batch helped me a lot. They constantly guided me to improve my skills. Some people also get employee referrals due to their connection with alumni working at Google. Mock interviews with seniors [came in handy]. Also, after listening to their story, I made sure I don’t repeat the mistakes they made. [Afterall], there is something to learn from those who fail too.

For example, While preparing for my interviews, I got in touch with some people who had previously interviewed with Google before. They told me what went wrong and what went right with their interviews. The general list of dos and don’ts.

One particular senior of mine asked me a question during a mock interview (He repeated the same question which he had encountered during his interview). I was shocked when he asked me to implement such an easy question, as I found it very easy to come up with the most optimal solution, but then he pointed out how my implementation had aliasing issues,which was a mistake he has made as well. This particular instance, made me realize that the pointer handling was not as simple as I thought.

Later in my interviews, I was asked to complete a function that accepted multiple pointers as arguments. I promptly remembered what my senior had taught me and took care of it. My interviewer asked me the reason for such a round about approach and I was able to explain the aliasing issue, to him. He probably didn’t think of it himself and was pretty impressed with the way I took care of the corner cases and the side effects of the function. So yes, learning from other’s experience helps a lot.

4. Constant Hard Work – Hard work and quick learning attitude along with positivity and confidence helped me during interviews. Confidence during interviews can create a good vibe between you and the interviewer. It creates that necessary first impression. After all it’s all about those 45 to 60 mins. I prepared hard for my interviews. Read up a lot of sample questions.

5. Competitive Programming – I think my experience with competitive Programming helped me in understanding data structures and algorithms. I am not a very good at competitive Programming. I only did it for few months, but during those months there was a steep learning curve. I really gained confidence in my own coding abilities. After competitive Programming I could easily reduce problems into simpler ones and implement it.

However, it is important to understand that competitive Programming is the not the only criteria that is required to get an Internship at Google. Rather most companies won’t even bother if you are good at competitive Programming.

I am not ranked higher on Codechef or Codeforces, I was once ranked 10th in a Codechef Long. My peak codechef rank is ~200, I think. That’s all.

Competitive Programming improves your basics – Data structures and Algorithms – which indeed is useful in solving a lot of real life problems. Then again, to be good at Data structures and algorithm you need not be good at competitive Programming. I think I am decent enough at Algorithms. I know most of the basic algorithms. I can implement some basic to medium-hard data structures – and I can adapt them to solve a given problem.

6. Open Source Contributions - Working with large code bases and working in collaboration with other programmers will improve your software Engineering skills. Most of the time, you won’t be building things from scratch and therefore, you must know how to understand a piece of code written by other programmers and edit it. That being said, you should also know how to re use codes as much as possible.

And open source contributions really improved my coding style overall. I learnt to write readable codes with no memory leaks or missing corner case.

All in all, Google interviews focussed on the basics. My questions were related to Binary Search Trees, Linked List and Arrays. One of the Design question required the use of Tries.

I knew all of those things in and out. I wrote good codes. My little experience with competitive Programming helped a lot. My grades were high because of which I got interview calls. I practiced a lot of questions for interviews.

This article has been adapted from here and here. You can find more about Ashish on his official Website.

The post 6 things I did to land a Summer Internship at Google HQ| by Ashish Kedia, Student, NIT-Surathkal. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

This was first published on DU Beat. 

Having recently won a gold medal for Karate at the US Open World Championship 2016, Bhaskar Sen, a student of Sri Venkateswara College, is juggling Engineering and his passion for Karate at the same time. He has made the nation proud, time and again, by bringing laurels to the country after participating in prestigious national and international events. Catch him in a conversation with DU Beat below :

 1. Out of all the various forms of martial arts and the different choices of sports available to a person, what drove your interest towards Karate?

Owing to the dearth of children, in my neighbourhood, I was prevented from indulging in and playing the popular sports like cricket, football and badminton. My elder brother was a black belt holder and I too started tagging along with him to his Karate lessons in the evening. Soon, I caught up with the sport and it became my passion.

 2. Can you give us an insight of your future plans?

I would like to continue practicing Karate irrespective of my plans for higher studies and gain more experience and insight into the world of this sport which may also soon become an Olympic Sport.

In the upcoming months I have plans to attend and represent India at a couple of International seminars and training camps which are to be held at Italy and United Kingdom.

Immediately following them, I may be called upon to participate in the World Premier Circuit Championships at Salzburg, Austria and Okinawa, Japan.

3. Being a college student, how do you strike a balance between your passion for karate and academics?

Unlike other countries, sportsmen in India, especially students, are not known to get sabbaticals from their workplace for their trainings and actual tournament participations unless one is pursuing the ever-popular sport of cricket.

The learning of the technical aspect is a regular round the year affair and is followed in between breaks in studies whenever possible. The regular physical exercises have to be stepped up or down depending upon the academic study load at that point of time in the year.

4. Based on your experiences, what do you think is the scope of Karate in India?

Though there are myriads of Karate clubs functioning in major cities of our country, Karate is yet not an overwhelmingly popular sport. This is because of a number of reasons like the coaching centres are being run by unqualified coaches and the centre is usually not affiliated to a national body, making them unauthorised;  Karate is not popularised in universities; and even the mainstream media falls shy of covering the events and competitions associated with this sport. Thus, it would really be helpful if the government chimes in to offer its support and takes steps to popularise, monitor and subsidise the training facilities.

5. Do you have any role models whom you look up to?

My foremost inspiration came from my elder brother, who took me to the Karate Dojo for the first time.  I have also seen my father’s unstinted support for me to pursue Karate and to build up extreme self- confidence.

In the professional sphere, I have always held my teacher, mentor and a Karate legend, Sensei Luca Valdesi from Italy as a role model who holds the unbeatable record of being World Champion for six years at a stretch. I also wonder at the accomplishments of Vu Duc Minh Dack, the living legend from France.

The post In conversation with Bhaskar Sen, Delhi University student and two-time Gold Medalist at the US Open World Championship for Karate. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

Infographic from: Visualistan

The post #dailyinspiration | 9 famous people who failed before they succeeded. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

I have always wanted to make it big in life. A well established working woman with big goals on target, was exactly the kind of life I saw myself living in the near future. What acted as a driving force was the fact that our college repeatedly stressed on gaining professional experience in various fields, through Internships at the end of each semester. That’s exactly when in May 2012, I came across Letsintern and the journey since then has been one thrilling experience!

Through Letsintern I applied and got selected for the following Internships:

1. KFC | WOW Ambassador
KFC, at that time, had just come up with their all new WOW 25 menu, introducing a new range of burgers, iced teas, ice-creams and more, for which they needed brand ambassadors for creating brand advocacy in colleges as students were the prime target of the campaign. As, the WOW ambassador for KFC, my job included promoting the WOW 25 menu amongst my friends, in and outside college, by distributing vouchers and making people aware about the various offers they could avail. Apart from this, creating content for the Social Media of KFC was one of the assigned tasks as well. We were also supposed to volunteer for organizing fun events at KFC restaurants in Pune to enhance user-experience, which was an overall exciting experience.

2. Campus Diaries | Marketing Team
The Campus Diaries Internship lasted for four weeks, and gave me a valuable insight into what difference a well-thought out Marketing and sales strategy can make in the building of an organisation. The Internship included contacting customers, pitching advertisements and coming up with ideas to set up a new sales strategy. Appropriate guidance was provided throughout the duration of my time at Campus Diaries.

3. Letsintern | Campus Manager:
As my third Internship, I was very fortunate to get a chance to be part of the Letsintern team itself. As their Campus Manager, I was responsible for promoting the culture of Internships and the ‘Start Young’ campaign – which I, myself strongly believe in – by making people aware about how Internships can serve as a valuable addition to their career and how Letsintern was making it possible for them to find their dream Internship. Apart from this, social media Marketing and on ground promotional activities followed along.
This Internship was a pleasure to do, as I was endorsing something I had already tried out and liked all the same. Since my college appreciates and encourages student Internships as a part of the curriculum, it worked out perfectly for me as it was considerably easy getting the students to understand the ‘Start Young’ campaign and motivating them to register on the site to experience Letsintern themselves. I also interacted with my batch mates and fellow students during the course of my Internship, which helped me grow my social circle widely.
(Letsintern is looking for Campus Ambassadors. Click here to apply today and get a chance to be part of The Letsintern team.) 

4. Mud Rush | Campus Ambassador
Being part of the Mud Rush was probably the best experience, I’ve had as far as Internships go, as it was not only different than all of my previous Internships, but was also was inclined towards adventure and encouraged all 18+ people to let go of their monotonous routine to have fun. I was their Campus Ambassador and my main job included informing people around me – in college and through Social Media – about the events that were going to be held during the Mud Rush and increase participation. The best part was the weekly rewards which were given out based on the performance. The top performers, in the end, were awarded a free pass to attend the Mud Rush event.

5. Dell Computers | Campus Ambassador
In my 15-day Internship with Dell Computers, our main task was to generate buzz about the brand by utilizing network to create a dialogue with the consumers. Using social media as an active tool for promotion was encouraged. We were also responsible for ensuring maximum participation in their new campaign running at the time, where we covered stories of people already using Dell and how has their experience been.

6. Channel V Indiafest | Registration Team
My last Internship was with Channel V’s Indiafest, where I was involved with the organizing team and was supposed to help out with the registrations. Being India’s largest fest for the students, by the students, interning for Indiafest helped me in building real-time social networks where I understood that  the power  communication exists beyond the usual social networking sites.

7. QS Top Universities | Marketing Team
I am currently working with the Marketing and Sales team of QS, which is organizing a World University Tour, where it aims to bring together key decision makers from all over the world on one platform to solve queries regarding funding, universities, admissions, job prospects, courses and anything more that you need to know before making the important decision of which university to pick for further studies. My job includes reaching out to people who plan to get a degree outside India in the near future and convince them to register for the University Tour to get all the information they might need.

One person I would certainly want to thank would be Karan (Letsintern Cluster Manager-Pune) whom I came in contact with while working for KFC. It was because of his continuous support that I went on to do so many Internships and managed them well. He was not only an incredible and very understanding person to work with; he was very patient and motivated everyone to do better. I’d even go out on a limb and say, he is by far the best boss I have ever had! : D
Thank you so much!

Lastly, I believe that there is tough competition out there & I want to seize the best opportunity I can find.

Shrishti Verma is an undergraduate student of Media and Communication from SIMC.

If you want to share your Internship story with us, mail us at blog@letsintern.com. Every week, we pick the best ones and feature them on our blog.

The post 8 months. 7 internships. Shrishti Verma’s story of “Starting Young” and where it took her. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

I’ve been using Quora on a daily basis, I love the product. And what I read about the company was pretty exciting.  So I submitted my resume on Quora careers.

A couple of days later, Katie Nguyen(Recruiter at Quora) sent me an email to schedule a 1 hour phone interview in an afternoon.  Islam Al-Aarag(Software Engineer at Quora) asked me to solve two problems, using an online text editor. In the end, I had some time to ask him questions. His answers made me more excited about the company.

The following day in the morning, Katie sent me an email to schedule the onsite interview.

I got there around 9:40 and checked-in at their reception:

Then I went to the Starbucks downstairs, bought a cup of coffee, sat down and relaxed for a while listening to music. 10:20 I went back to the reception and met other 3 candidates that were about to start their interview at 10:30 too. One from Caltech, one from CMU and the other from NYU. Katie welcomed us and, before splitting to our interview rooms, we got to see part of their office. One thing that caught my attention was a world map on a wall, with all Quora’s employees pined in the cities they came from. Yes, I was wishing badly to add one more pin to that map

1. I first had a practical interview with Eric Morphis(Engineer at Quora). A real codebase had been previously setup on a Macbook, and I was provided written instructions for the tasks.
2. Chun-Ho Hung(Quora Product Engineer) asked me coding problems and I was given the choice to use the whiteboard or the laptop and to use the language I prefer. Even though with a text editor I can type faster, use auto-complete and copy and move code around, I chose the whiteboard since it was way larger than the Macbook’s display, allowing me to draw and explain my thoughts more easily. And I chose Python since it’s less verbose than other languages I’m familiar with: less time to write the code = more time to think about the solution.
3. I then had a lunch interview with Deborah Alves(Software Engineer at Quora) and had a chance to meet Adrien Lucas Ecoffet(Engineer at Quora) and Ryan Cheu(Quora Product Engineer). I got to know a bit about them and their work at Quora. The food was delicious by the way.
4. My next technical interview was with Kornél Csernai(Engineer at Quora). He asked me coding problems. Again I could choose a Programming language and whether or not to use the whiteboard, I made the same choices.
5. I then had an interview with Veni Johanna(Engineer at Quora, who also interned with them in 2013, and 2012). She asked me relevant questions about my background and motivations.
6. Finally I had an interview with Katie Nguyen. Among other topics, we spoke about my graduation date and potential timeline for an Internship. And then she showed me the office.

By the end of each interview I had time to ask questions, and all the interviewers were pleasant to answer them.

No wasted time, the interviews were back to back. A meeting room was fully booked for my onsite interview and when one interview ended the next interviewer was promptly waiting to proceed.

The interviewing process was 100% professional and well-rounded.  The questions didn’t overlap and they covered a broad spectrum.

It was great to visit their office, meet some Quora employees and get to know more about the company. I had a positive experience, regardless of the outcome.

I went back to Menlo Park, worked on my Internship project for a couple of hours and enjoyed the happy hour (it was Friday!).

Monday was a federal holiday. On Tuesday morning, Katie sent me an email saying she had “good news”. That same day, we had a phone call and the offer was signed by me, and then by Adam D’Angelo(CEO, Quora). It’s not only development and deployment that happen quickly at Quora!

I’m super excited, I look forward to joining Quora in the summer!

This article has been adapted from this answer on Quora. 

The post I intervewed with Quora for a Summer Internship. Here’s how it went. – by Cesar Ilharco, former SWE intern at Google, Amazon, and Facebook. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

DU Beat got a chance to chat with the newly crowned fbb Femina Miss India, Priyadarshini Chatterjee, who also happens to be a student of Delhi University. Priyadarshini shared with us her thoughts on her journey from being a three year old kid dressed as Miss World to the winner of fbb Femina Miss India, her future plans, and also her preparations for the upcoming semester exams!

Q) How are you feeling right now? Has the feeling sunk in that you won such a major event?

It’s been almost 25 days since the win. I had a lovely homecoming after it. By now, yes, it has definitely sunk in. The kind of response I’ve got is something I never imagined I would get. Initially when it happened, I really couldn’t believe it.

Q) How confident were you about winning, when you were standing on the stage, given that you were competing against some of the most beautiful and capable women in the country?

Before the finale show actually started, I was very, very nervous. In fact, I was panicking and I was calling my parents and friends and saying, “What do I do? I’m really nervous.” But I remember that the moment the show started, when the music came on and I had to go on stage, I forgot everything and I was just enjoying. What helped me was the fact that I started enjoying the moment so much that everything else just kind of flew out of my mind.

Q) You are from Guwahati, you went on to win Miss India Delhi and now you are the Miss India. How would you say your journey has been? What made you want to enter the pageant and what kept you motivated?

I come from Assam. It’s the kind of place where everybody knows everyone and I was there for quite some time. Then I came to Delhi, where the exposure was understandably much more. Once I started working in Delhi, I figured out that I have a lot to work on with myself. I was already interested in participating in Miss India but there was this fear of rejection that was stopping me. However, when the Delhi auditions happened, I just knew I had to go for it. The credit actually goes to my parents who kept me motivated. I gave the auditions and I won, and once you’re there, there’s no looking back. The pageant continued and I kept going. The journey- the flow of it- has been very smooth for me and I’ve learnt a lot.

Q) Where did that first thought about entering the pageant come from? Did you follow the earlier pageants, or was it something you became interested in after starting modeling and entering the circuit?

I never wanted to participate in any pageants other than Miss India because it’s the most reputed one. Moreover, it’s not just about beauty and looks but beyond that. I was scared too. There are so many beautiful and smart women in India. When I was three years old, my mom dressed me up as Miss World for a fancy dress competition. That was when I knew that a platform like this existed, and it fascinated me. I never used to watch pageants. I’ve not followed any of the previous Miss India pageants. It was something that I personally wanted to do and I went forward with it.

Q) You’re now set to represent India at the Miss World pageant, which puts you in the same league as many other formidable women. Have the preparations for it already begun? What are your expectation from this even bigger platform?

Yes, they have begun. In fact, I just got back from one of my sessions. We have many sessions – a make-up session, hair session, nutrition session, and others. The two-other rank holders have these sessions as well. It’s about bringing out the best in ourselves. The next thing that we’ll do will be at the global level. It requires a lot of hard work. Another important thing I have to do is to know about the culture of India. I’m working on that by reading books, familiarising myself with places by travelling. What I need to do is be aware of our culture and put my best foot forward at a platform where there’ll be many smart and beautiful women from around the world.

Q) You’re currently a B.A (H) Sociology student in Hindu College. The previous two winners, Koyal Rana (DDUC) and Aditi Arya (SSCBS), were also Delhi University students. Do you think being from DU gives a person a certain edge?

When I came to Delhi from Guwahati, Delhi University itself was a big exposure for me. Being from a small place and then coming to DU, where I met people from all over the country and made friends with them, gave me a confidence boost and opened me up to new possibilities. I wouldn’t call myself an introvert but I was used to my own little world and my own friends. When I came to DU, I started exploring. I auditioned for the Dramatics society of my college and I am, in fact, a part of Masque, the English Dramatics society of Hindu College. My audition for Masque was one of the instances where I walked out of my comfort zone to achieve something. I definitely think DU has given me confidence and exposure.

Q) How do you plan to balance your studies and your duties as Miss India? Would you like to continue with your studies or do you want to pursue something else?

I want to continue with my studies, that’s not something I want to lose out on. It’s something that gives me a base in life. After graduation, I’d love to pursue Anthropology of Travel and Tourism.

It definitely gets hard to balance the two but I don’t think it’s impossible.

Q) Since you’re already involved in modeling, the next obvious question people would ask has to be- does Bollywood figure into your plans?

*sighs* Oh yes, it’s definitely the most common question. Personally, I don’t see myself in Bollywood right now. I think the people who do that have different aspirations and different motives in life. However, if you ask me if I would like to work as an Assistant Director, I’d love to do that. Being onscreen is something I’m not aiming for yet. Of course, if the right opportunity comes my way and if I really like a certain role, I’d consider it but I’m more of a behind-the-screen person.

Q) Switching over to slightly different questions, do you consider yourself a feminist? How would you define feminism?

Concepts like Feminism are very subjective. I may have an opinion which may be different from yours. I don’t think I am in a position to define something like this. But to me, Feminism means putting women in the front too so that men and women can be equals. It’s not just about women having the upper hand but rather both the genders working as equals for the progress of society.

I wouldn’t call myself a feminist because right now it is going somewhere- who even knows where it’s going? I think the concept of Feminism is being misunderstood and people are being misled. In a situation like this, I wouldn’t really call myself a feminist.

Q) How would you correlate the concept of Feminism to platforms like Miss India which, while amazing, also perpetuate certain ideologies?

People always assume that beauty pageants are all about how a person looks and how tall they are, but trust me, there were girls in the pageant who were taller and prettier than me. It’s not just about looks, it’s also about how smart you are and if you can go and make conversation with anyone at a moment’s notice. I think it’s a stereotype associated with beauty pageants and it’s something we need to get rid of. I don’t think it’s accurate at all.

Q) Having been involved in Miss India now, do you think there’s anything about the Indian beauty pageant scene and the modeling scene that needs to change? Is there anything that irks you?

I don’t think so. With respect to the Indian beauty pageants scene, I think we’re doing well and going places, and we’ll do even better in the future. If I can get the Miss World crown, it’ll go even better. It’s definitely something I want to do for the industry as well.

Q) How about as a participant? Do you think anything needs to change in the way the industry treats and welcomes participants and newcomers?

I was more than welcomed. We were all staying away from our families and friends during the pageant. We made families there. The people I’m working with right now, who are a part of my team, I knew them during the pageant too. They are family to me. If people believe something else, I think that’s a misconception. Everyone’s been very sweet.

Q) What do you aspire to achieve with the power that comes with being Miss India? Is there a cause that’s close to your heart that you want to work for?

Yes, I have my project Shishu Kalyan. I don’t like talking about it as people may think it’s a clichéd thing to do, that I’m talking about social work because I am Miss India. I feel for the cause and so I’ve taken it up. Shishu Kalyan is about child labour. I want to put in my bit for the betterment of the children in slum areas. I educate not just the children but also their parents about the importance of educating their kids, even in the smallest of ways. If I can even teach them cultural activities like dancing, singing, and about culture, it can give them to incentive to stay away from things like substance abuse which is very common in those areas. I’m working on this and am planning to collaborate with an NGO soon to take this forward.

Q) Was there anything you watched or read throughout the entire journey to keep you company and to motivate you?

Yes, I did. I am a firm believer of the Law of Attraction. I’ve been reading the book ‘The Secret’ for two years. I’m not a person who reads a lot. I’d rather watch a movie than read a book, but this one book changed my life drastically. The law of attraction is about how you can attract positive things in your life. It works on the principle of Ask, Believe and Receive. You ask for what you want, you believe in it and you receive it. This is something I’ve followed and I think it has played in part in getting me where I am today.

Interview taken by Shubham Kaushik for DU Beat

The post In Conversation with Priyadarshini Chatterjee, Fbb Femina Miss India 2016. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

We tend to think of the world’s super rich as super successful, disciplined people who work harder and have greater opportunities than the average person.

Though money isn’t always a measure of success, you can’t deny they must do certain things to achieve this success, right? that those who have amassed billions have experienced great successes in their lives and careers.

They must do certain things to achieve this success, right? They’re better at achieving their goals. They live healthier lifestyles and can manage stress better than other people. They’re classy and influential and exist in a whole other universe.

Billionaires are just people, and some of their habits may surprise you. It’s not all caviar lunches, regimented scheduling, and the lap of luxury.

Here are some of the surprising habits of the wealthiest people on the planet:

1. They swim against the tide.

Becoming supersuccessful means you need to outperform everyone else at whatever you’re doing, right?

Nope. It often means you shouldn’t even be playing their game. Billionaires aren’t better than others; they’re doing something different than the others.

Warren Buffett amassed his fortune by buying investments and businesses when everyone else wanted out. Bill Gates didn’t want to build the types of programs everyone else was focused on; he wanted to build something people hadn’t even thought of yet but would realize they needed as soon as they experienced it.

If it seems as if you’re stuck in a rat race and constantly trying to outdo the next person, break away from the pack. Your ideas might have little to no support, but big rewards require big risk. If others don’t understand your vision, it doesn’t mean it’s your vision that is wrong.

2. They are frugal.

Mark Zuckerberg drives a Volkswagen GTI. That’s right, the founder and CEO of Facebook, who’s worth an estimated $33 billion, drives a $30,000 car.

We often think of the superwealthy as indulgent, with opulent and even wasteful lifestyles. In truth, many billionaires are shrewd businesspeople who are incredibly frugal and personally accountable for their expenditures. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, for example, still shops at CostCo.

Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Limited, is worth an estimated $12.2 billion but still drives an inexpensive car. He’s said to travel by rickshaw to and from the Bangalore airport for Business trips.

It flies in the face of the stereotype to have many billionaires actually be very frugal. In American culture, we tend to crave the flashy cars, the big houses, and all the toys. Billionaires are adept at making money but at keeping it as well, and part of that means living below their means for many.

3. They do for themselves.

The Hollywood stereotype of the über-rich might have left you thinking billionaires don’t do anything for themselves. They have dog walkers, maids, assistants, butlers, and drivers to take care of the monotonous chores of everyday life.

Contrary to this image, billionaires often do just fine fending for themselves. Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen, worth an estimated $16.3 billion, still packs his own lunch every day! He told the Financial Times he prefers a sandwich and a Gatorade.

It’s true that the supersuccessful often surround themselves with supportive people — they understand they can’t do everything on their own. But this doesn’t mean they’re helpless or lazy when it comes to doing the same things each day that regular people do.

4. They fail on a regular basis.

Show me a billionaire who has succeeded at every single thing he or she has ever tried — go on, name one!

Everyone has failures and successes. Billionaires often fail at epic scale, thanks to the sheer size of the deals and investments they’re involved in. The trick is, they understand that failure is just a bump in the road on the path to greater success.

Hotel magnate Kirk Kerkorian, at 97 years old, is worth an estimated $4.4 billion. Over the course of his lengthy career, he’s made and lost millions many times over. Best known for helping to shape Las Vegas, Kerkorian also had a tumultuous relationship with the auto industry, including massive losses in his Ford stock during the 2008 economic crisis. Still, he kept taking risks and continues to this day.

Billionaires know that you have to fail sometimes. They just become more adept at it.

5. They take better care of themselves.

If you had an unlimited income, you could eat whatever you wanted! Again, there’s a stereotype that the superwealthy can be gluttonous or partake in lavish meals (that the rest of us can only dream of) and then lay around all day.

Sure, they can afford whatever they want, yet best-selling author Tom Corley points out that 70 percent of the wealthy consume less than 300 junk food calories per day, compared with 3 percent of less-affluent people. They get more exercise, too — Corley puts the percentage of the wealthy who do aerobic exercise at least four days a week at 76 percent, compared with just 23 percent of the poor.

David Murdock, chairman of Dole Foods, recently told Forbes he expects to live to 125 (he’s 90 now), thanks to his diet and healthy lifestyle. A vegetarian since his 60s, Murdock is more active than many people half his age. He’s an advocate of daily physical exercise and still rides horses, practices yoga, and does weight training.

Billionaires aren’t some alien life form or even anomalies as people. Their habits may be much the same as yours and contradict everything you’ve come to expect about how the 1 percent live!

This article was first published on Medium by Larry Kim. 

The post 5 things World’s Wealthiest People are doing right now and you aren’t! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

Kamran Ali was born and brought up in the small town of Layyah, Pakistan. Kamran’s first bicycle tour was as a 13 years old who picked up two friends on a little bicycle and did a round-trip to a nearby town covering 52 kilometers in a day. His longest trip in Pakistan was in 2002 when he pedalled about 400 Kilometers from Multan to Lahore in less than two days in the blistering heat.

Later on, Kamran moved to Germany for further studies. During the flight from Islamabad to Frankfurt, he looked down the window, and had the epiphany that changed his course of life – he saw himself, on the lone road, crossing barren deserts and the rugged terrain. He was pedalling on the endless strip of tarmac under scorching sun, with the desert wind singing songs and the Duduk music playing in the far distance.

Nine years went by. In the meantime, he finished his  Masters Degree and later earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science, but not a day had gone by, when he didn’t think about the eight hour long flight, and the image of a cyclist riding through exotic places.

He realized, he could no longer ignore the calling and decided to pursue this dream. In 2011, he left from Germany to Pakistan on a bicycle.

In forty five days, he crossed eight countries, and reached half-way by covering almost 4500 kilometres.

When Kamran reached the Sivas city in Turkey, he received the news of hospitalisation of his mother due to a heart-attack. Kamran decided to abandon his tour, and flew back to Pakistan to be with her mum.

Not only was his dream was left incomplete, but more importantly he had lost his mother, to whom he had dedicated his long journey. He regretted keeping her waiting for four years as his cycling plans kept delaying the visit to Pakistan.

So Kamran decided to soon commence his bicycle journey from exactly where he had left off – starting from Sivas Turkey in March 2015, his route will was supposed to cover seven thousand kilometres in over four months, taking him through remote places in Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China and Pakistan.

At the age, when his friends and peers were moving up the ladder of career and starting their families, Kamran was at a crossroad in his life, having recently quit his hard-earned job, risked his professional career, and ready to make other sacrifices just to follow his dream. It is a big leap of faith, which came to fruition on August 8th, 2015, when he finally finished his bicycle tour and reached his destination, his home – Pakistan.

You can view the entire Album of Kamran’s journey on his Facebook page here.

Content has been adapted from Kamran’s official Website.

The post Kamran On Bike | One man’s bicycle journey from Germany to Pakistan, spanning 28 countries. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

1. Thomas Suarez: A 12-year-old app developer
Thomas Suarez, a 12 year old, taught himself to build iphone apps. His interest in Technology and Programming led him to learn Python, Java, and C “just to get the basics down.” He built Earth Fortune and then coaxed his parents into paying the $99 fee to get his app in the app store. He also started an app club at school to help other kids build and share their creations, and is now starting his own company, CarrotCorp.

2. Taylor Wilson: Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor
Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs, and that kids can change the world. And he knows something about both of those: When he was 14, he built a working fusion reactor in his parents’ garage. Now 17, he takes the TED stage at short notice to tell (the short version of) his story.

3. Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer
Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than two percent chance of survival. How could this be? Jack Andraka talks about how he developed a promising early detection test for pancreatic cancer that’s super cheap, effective and non-invasive — all before his 16th birthday.

4. Sirena Huang: An 11-year-old’s magical violin
Sirena Huang started taking violin lessons at age 4 and made her professional solo debut at 9 with the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. She has won top prizes in numerous international competitions, delighting audiences worldwide with her virtuosity and charm.

In a charming interlude, the 11-year-old praises the timeless Design of her instrument, and then proceeds to give a technically brilliant and emotionally nuanced performance.

5. William Kamkwamba: How I harnessed the wind
At age 14, in poverty and famine, a Malawian boy built a windmill to power his family’s home. Now at 22, William Kamkwamba, who speaks at TED, here, for the second time, shares in his own words the moving tale of invention that changed his life.

6. Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose, Naomi Shah: Award-winning teenage science in action
In 2011 three young women swept the top prizes of the first Google Science Fair. Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose and Naomi Shah describe their extraordinary projects — and their route to a passion for science.

7. Tavi Gevinson: A teen just trying to figure it out
Fifteen-year-old Tavi Gevinson had a hard time finding strong female, teenage role models — so she built a space where they could find each other. At TEDxTeen, she illustrates how the conversations on sites like Rookie, her wildly popular web magazine for and by teen girls, are putting a new, unapologetically uncertain and richly complex face on modern feminism.

8. Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao: Two young scientists break down plastics with bacteria
Once it’s created, plastic (almost) never dies. While in 12th grade Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao went in search of a new bacteria to biodegrade plastic — specifically by breaking down phthalates, a harmful plasticizer. They found an answer surprisingly close to home.

9. Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids
Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs “childish” thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.

10. Richard Turere: My invention that made peace with lions
In the Maasai community where Richard Turere lives with his family, cattle are all-important. But lion attacks were growing more frequent. In this short, inspiring talk, the young inventor shares the solar-powered solution he designed to safely scare the lions away.

The post #Daily Inspiration | 10 TED Talks from Inventors under 20 that’d make your day! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

This article was published on Medium by David Byttow. He’s the CEO of Bold, and formerly was the CEO of Secret and has also worked at Google, Square, and Medium.

Since publishing ABC: Always Be Coding – How to Land an Engineering Job, many have asked how I got an Engineering job at Google without a college degree. Here’s my story, your mileage may vary.

I had every intention of going to college. My college of choice was UCLA. Unfortunately, I had an embarrassingly low high school GPA (2.45) and so didn’t exactly have my pick of the university litter. Instead, I took Computer Science classes at Purdue Calumet, a satellite of Purdue University, with the intention of eventually transferring, or finding another way out. Nearly two semesters in, the latter happened in the form of an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Step #1: Fake it ‘til you make it. While in college, I worked for a small company in Griffith, Indiana building Websites for local businesses at $12/hour. The job wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I imagined my future career, but it could have been worse.

I kept my head down, under-promised and over-delivered on several projects. This built a lot of credit. And the company made a hefty margin off of my hourly rate. Meanwhile, I was trying to create a game in my spare time, which I didn’t have much of. So, I went for a hail mary and asked management to give me three months to build my game on their dime and sell it online. I drew up fancy spreadsheets and colorful graphs showing them how the shareware model worked and how they were sure to turn a profit. I had little idea what I was doing yet somehow they bought into it, perhaps it was the pretty colors.

Two months into development, I released a demo online. A fledgling Startup in California called CodeFire took notice as they were essentially making the same damn game, a top-down space shooter, similar to SubSpace except in 3D. Unfortunately, they communicated this to me in the form of a cease-and-desist letter. There was only one response I could give, “Sure, I’ll stop — if you hire me to work on yours instead.” They replied with an offer. And so I picked up and went.

Note: The company retained the rights to the original game. I gave three weeks notice and parted on good terms.

Step #2: Befriend a master. This is the probably one of the most important things you can do. Find someone that is a master at your craft, make them your mentor, and never stop learning. While working at Double Helix that master was Nathan Hunt, one of the smartest and most humble guys I had ever met. And he was extremely patient with all of my questions no matter how elementary. I must have walked into his office thousands of times to ask random questions like, “how can I smoothly interpolate from one rotation matrix to another?” or “how should I implement moving capsule-to-cylinder collision detection?” Years later, he would join Google one month after me.

Each of my mentors changed something about the way I approached problems or viewed the world. And there are only a small handful.

Step #3: Fill in the gaps. Because I didn’t have a formal CS degree, I knew I lacked a lot of fundamental knowledge. For example, I implemented a physics engine but never solved a dynamic Programming problem. To fill these gaps, I implemented nearly all of the most common data structures and algorithms that I heard or read about. The information you need is out there in spades, but there’s a chasm between knowing how something works by observing it, and knowing why something works by building it.

Over time, do the following:

1. Master at least one of C, C++, Objective-C, Java, PHP, Python or Ruby. Become fluent in at least one of the other languages and become familiar with Scala, Haskell or Lisp.
2. Learn your data structures. Implement most of them. Understand their  time complexities.
3. Solve Programming problems. Read this and solve many of these.
4. Build your portfolio of (un)finished projects (e.g., Programming frameworks, mobile or web apps, small games, and so on).

Step #4: Find confidence. Six years after leaving Indiana, I had shipped about six games across multiple platforms. I was getting bored and needed a new challenge. I applied to Google and felt that if I were hired, I’d be a “real engineer,” something I struggled with since I didn’t have that coveted piece of paper. But, I never heard back and I wasn’t surprised.

One year later, I resubmitted my resume. Except this time I took the “Education” section out of it altogether. Ironically, a recruiter called me and scheduled a technical phone-screen interview. I asked if we could schedule it for two weeks later and she agreed. I needed that time. I used it to cram as many algorithms and data structures into my head as humanly possible. I coded 12-14 hours a day and solved hundreds of problems. I was literally obsessed and wouldn’t stop until my fear of the Google interview turned into confidence and excitement.

I remember every single one of my interviews at Google and had a blast with all of them. The interviewers were fun to talk to, and I believe they could see that I was excited to be there and welcomed their problems.

Some of the problems given to me were:

1) Given a set of 2-dimensional points, compute a skyline. This was easy. I drew upon a common data structure known as a max heap. There are several solutions, here is a good one.

2) Design Microsoft Paint. This was by far the most fun problem. I started by drawing up interfaces and a class diagram. I made mention of a Paint Bucket and the interviewer asked me to implement it. Luckily, I knew how to implement an iterative, breadth-first traversal with my eyes closed thanks to TopCoder.

3) Describe your software virtues. This was an “open-ended” discussion interview. I talked about the types of testing and when they are valuable (e.g., unit, integration, acceptance). I talked about consistent style for maintainability of code. And so on. Things you would find in books like Code Complete or Effective Java.

I was genuinely enjoying each round of interviews and solving the problems thrown at me. Had I not prepared the way I did, I am certain things would be very different. After the interviews, I had a very good feeling. But, I had heard even if the hiring committees agreed to move forward with an offer, that Larry himself would have to sign off on it. I feared that as soon as he saw my lack of education, I was toast.

But that didn’t happen, and one day while I was eating sushi for lunch in Santa Clara, I got the call and enthusiastically accepted the offer. On that day, I knew for certain that I wasn’t ever going back to school.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

All images used in this post belong to their respective owners. 

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This article was written by Mitch McLaughlin on Medium.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the views of companies I have previously worked for.

This piece was inspired by ambitious professionals asking how I did it. It is intended to shine light on the Internship process, be relevant to Internships generally, and share my personal experiences.

GoPro is the one of the coolest companies in the world — and also one of the most challenging. If you’re up for it, this is for you.

Writing on this topic was not easy because hiring strategies are constantly evolving. There are also many articles about getting Internships already. My favorite is by my friend, Andre Tacuyan, and his Design Internship at Google. Give it a read (it will broaden your perspective for this topic). My article will explore areas he didn’t.

Recruiters at elite companies are elusive. They are trying to solve million dollar people problems everyday. They are dealing with full-time hires, participating in interviews, integrating complex hiring systems, and working cross-functionally on projects. So, when it comes to the application it MUST be quick & powerful. Cut out all the bullshit and simplify your message.

Here’s are the keys to landing an Internship at GoPro.

The Resume.

It has to be great. To give you a taste I’ve attached mine.(1)

Notice, the feel, layout, and aesthetics. What a resume is doing is giving the hiring manager an emotional taste of the person. It’s visual communication. Kind of like dating. Will it give a good first impression? Will the reader be intrigued to learn more?

Build the automated application.

I recommend playing the long game, the intern process will start in August ending in May (worst case scenario). If you fail to secure an offer in the fall you still have the spring to fall back on. When I accepted my offer from GoPro, I had sent over 2000 applications in a 8 month period, been selected for over 40 phone interviews, and did 12 in-person interviews from New York to San Francisco. Out of those 12 interviews, I was given 4 legitimate job offers. I gambled and turned 2 of them down because they were shitty offers. But in the end, GoPro panned out.

How do you efficiently send 2000 applications? It’s not easy, but you have to use software to save time. Build or download software to assist with filling out forms (demographic information, education history, work experience, military status, and minority status). I wrote my own scripts to fill out forms, but Dashlane is sufficient and Autofill occasionally works. Once you enter your information, create a user account with the Website and save it. Anytime an application asks you to answer an open-ended question or write an essay, append it to a word document so you can reuse it. A good rule of thumb is to avoid doing any task twice. Take advantage of career sites allowing you to add and apply to multiple jobs with one job profile. If you are an engineer there are a variety of positions with overlapping skill sets. The same applies to the Business side.

Use links. Many applications ask for a resume, portfolio, blog, and social media accounts. Use software to build & organize all this into a personal Website and point to it. Here’s mine. Build a core version of your resume & cover letter, then create tailored variations for each specific company & position.

One common mistake is applying to as many companies as possible. In this case, quantity over quality is NOT better. Focusing on 200 quality companies (or less) is ideal. The goal of the automated application is to free up hours originally intended for repetitive tasks to do productive tasks like creative thinking for open-ended questions, essays, portfolio Design, and networking.

Be opportunistic.

Investing all of your time into one company during the hiring process is dangerous. I wouldn’t recommend it. Being opportunistic is a more practical strategy. What this means is the best offer will likely come from company 2,3,4 or 5 on your list. Don’t be defeated, just embrace the opportunity.

Building the automated application is one part in a larger strategy of being opportunistic. It assumes change is the only constant in today’s environment. Having an extremely diverse skill set makes you opportunistic and will increase your odds.

Be patient & poised.

Sometimes the job offer isn’t immediate. One company may interview you 5 times, or string you out, and that’s OK. A very good piece of advice I received from a former Google recruiter is “we will call you”. This simply means the recruiter controls when hiring progress is made. In March, I sat without a legitimate offer because nothing was the right fit. I patiently waited. It eventually came and changed everything.

For inspiration.

Sometimes it’s all about the story. As Chris Sacca says:

Good stories always beat good spreadsheets.

— Chris Sacca (@sacca) November 24, 2014

Let this sink in and allow your mind explore all the untapped ways to attract an employer.

GoPro.

On-boarding at GoPro is straightforward. In 2015, there were roughly 40 summer interns at HQ in San Mateo, California. Every Thursday, all employees get 2 hours of “Live It, Love It, Eat It” time in the afternoon to do whatever they want. Common activities include surfing, playing soccer, slack lining, and going out to eat. The only requirement is to use the GoPro camera. My most memorable experiences during “Live It, Love It, Eat It” times were surfing with coworkers. It was a blast!

When I was selected for my interview, it’s likely my skydiving & surfing pictures on social media helped my case as a cultural fit. So, if you do cool stuff post it to the internet; tag it with #GoPro, #GoProIntern, or#GoProLiveIt. Employees monitor these channels. GoPro runs contestsfrequently and reward you with money. These are all chances to show how you can add value before employment and fit into the GoPro culture.

All of the Internship opportunities are posted on the GoPro Website.

Most technical Internships appear in the fall and non-technical in the spring. I remember looking at the GoPro career page thinking, I do not know what the hell some of the positions are. This is normal. Every company has a different organizational structure & a unique name for each job opportunity. If the position remotely aligns with your skills apply for it. In the tech world, interns often have multiple interviews for different positions within a company and are fought over. This is great.

The best place to learn: the GoPro subreddit.

Sometime’s the best thing to do is the most obvious. Be yourself and invest in yourself. The Internship game can be grueling and it’s just a small slice of the big career pie. Don’t sweat it.

For more specific questions, I’d be happy to talk. Find me on social media, email me at mitch(dot)mclaughlin1(at)gmail, or text 415.867.7022.

Here’s a 1 minute video I made of my time at GoPro!

The post “How I landed an internship at GoPro (and you can, too!)” – by Mitch McLaughlin. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

1. Ankita Sheth, Vista Rooms:
After completing her Bachelor’s in Media Studies from Narsee Monjee College of Commerce and Economics, followed by PGeMBA in Human Resource Management from Mumbai Educational Trust, Ankita started her career as an Associate at Stanton Chase International, and went on to work at Boston Analytics, and Providence World, before landing at OYO Rooms, as the Head of Acquisitions.

As an avid traveler, plagued by bad experiences, Ankita decided to bring about a necessary change in the hospitality industry. As a part of her research, she spent over a month, taking trans, buses, cars and other means of transport, to reach her destinations, and taking note of the budget accommodation options she discovered on the way.

“We started researching and travelling a lot to smaller towns of India as we believed that Tier 2 and 3 cities offered below par services and they called for a revamp,” she told YourStory. “From experiencing a dirty sink to zero towels in the bathroom to enjoying the perks of a surprisingly clean room and bathroom, I experienced it all and that only went on to reaffirm my belief in the fact that Tier 2 and 3 cities have all the potential, what is missing is connecting the dots,” she added.

Hence, the idea of Vista Rooms was born in 2015, to bring standardised, and branded accommodations to  smaller towns, with a sheer focus on quality, affordability, customer experience and hospitality.

Ankita is joined by Amit Damani, and Pranav Maheshwari, who handle Marketing and Tech, respectively. Headquartered in Mumbai, Vista Rooms has presence in over 450+ properties in 50+ cities, and recently expanded to Sri Lanka as well.

2. Aditi Gupta, Menstrupedia
Hailing from Garhwa in Jharkhand, Aditi Gupta completed her Bachelor’s in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, from Hindutan College of Science and Technology, and proceeded to pursue a Post-graduate from National Institute of Design(NID) – where she came face-to-face with the immense amount taboo surrounding with the topic of menstruation, and female hygiene. On further research, she was taken aback by the lack of communication channels available to young girls, where they could be educated about their bodies, and seek answers regarding the appalling misconceptions/myths regarding the same.

This persuaded her to take an initiative, with Tuhin Paul, who was equally concerned about the lack of awareness regarding the issue, and Menstrupedia came into existence, while they were both still students at NID. They were later joined by Rajat Mittal, who graduated from Arizona State University in 2013.

“We created a prototype where we explained menstruation through comic medium using characters and stories, and tested it with young girls. We received a very positive response. So, one inspiration was this that what we are doing at Menstrupedia has a thorough year long research to back it,” says Aditi.

Their illustrated comic – ‘A friendly guide to period for girls’ in association with the famous sanitary product brand Whisper, addresses commonly asked questions about puberty, premenstrual syndrome, reproduction, menstrual cycle, hygiene measure during periods, and more. Currently, it is being used by 50 schools, and 20 NGOs in India, and in 7 other countries, to educate young girls. They also joined hands with Procter & Gamble for ‘Touch the Pickle’ campaign, to shun the age-old myth that abstained women from touching a pickle jar/container, for they might ruin it, and/or render it ‘impure’. The campaign soon went viral, and won the Grand Prix for gender-equality category at the Cannes Lions International Festival.

Aditi was also listed in Forbes 30 under 30 list, in 2014, and considers every woman raising her voice against the mentrual taboo, an inspiration. The road to entrepreneurship was not easy-peasy for Aditi.

“One hardship that we initially faced was raising funds. The moment we’d say that we want to do something related to menstruation and creating an educational tool, people would tell me that there is absolutely no market or ask if we were an NGO. We had a hard time convincing investors that this is something that’s going to work. When we launched our crowd funding campaign, we only had two months of run time to survive. We had to cut our monthly budget. We moved to a one room flat to cut the costs and bring out the book. But on the other hand we received an amazing response from people and our users loved what we were doing. It was kind of a litmus test for us but finally we raised more than we wanted to raise,” she explains.

Menstrupedia was also recognized by Melinda Gates, co-founder of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that she started with her husband and Founder of Microsoft – Bill Gates. “This is a great creative solution to a tough cultural challenge,” she said.

3. Garima Satija, Posh Vine:
After completing her MBA from Amity Business School, Garima worked as a Consultant at Quadrangle Consulting, and as a Senior HR Manager at Ozone Media, before she embraced her entrepreneurial side with PoshVine – a Bangalore based Startup, which provides a SaaS platform for enterprises, that are looking to offer an experiential engagement (across dining, travel, leisure, specialty retail and entertainment) or loyalty program to their customers.

Launched in 2011, PoshVine started off as an online platform to discover and book dining experiences, for which they initially started aggregating premium restaurants, and experimental chefs, who were interested in providing a bunch of high-end unique activities surrounding the same theme. Following this, they allowed individuals and businesses to book packages, picking the activities they were wanted. This was met with a great response, post which they decided to explore activity-options beyond just dining.

Today, they curate over 10,000 activities for employers, and have an impressive clientele list consisting of big names like Jaguar, Axis Bank, Pernod Ricard, Jet Privilege, Häagen-Dazs, HDFC Bank, Diners Club International, and more.

4. Niharika Jhunjhunwala, SugarBox:
After graduating from the London School of Economics, in Economics and Management, Niharika ended up in her hometown of Kolkata, after being faced with the difficulty in obtaining a work visa for working in London, or a sponsorship, and having a family engagement that needed urgent tending to. Here, she briefly worked with the Cabinet Secretariat, in Delhi, before Sugarbox happened.

Driven by the idea that you don’t need another person pamper you, Sugarbox offers a monthly subscription for a surprise box, containing goodies, gourmet treats, accessories, beauty products, apparel, footwear, and much, much more. Best part? These boxes aren’t just limited for women! Apart from the basics of clothing, and eatables, men’s boxes also come with cuff links, hipflasks, electronics, grooming kits, and sometimes even chopsticks! “The idea was to start something which gives this instant pick-me-up feeling. Often the salaried class is left with no money to pamper themselves at the end of the month and that is just when this goody box arrives. And as it is a subscription model, there is no money involved in it,” Niharika explains in an interview with YourStory.

“We despatch the boxes by the 24^th of a month and give it a good 3-4 days time before we reveal the contents on our site. The challenge is to keep the surprise element intact for all subscribers till they get it, given that those who get it are so excited to receive the box that they tend to reveal the contents on the social media as soon as they receive it,” she adds.

5. Richa Kar, Zivame:
Hailing from Jamshedpur, Richa pursued Civil Engineering at Birla Institute of Technology and Science(BITS), Pilani, followed by MBA from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies(NMIMS). After adding a rich experience of 8 years on her portfolio, from Spencer’s to SAP, she started Zivame – the word Ziva in Hebrew means Radiance. Ziva-me is “radiant me” – in 2010.

Her inspiration behind the online lingerie platform was simple:
“I realised there was so much social discomfort while buying lingerie that it got reduced to a 5 minutes hurried chore.

Most shops did not keep all the sizes, and smaller shops have male salesman making it really difficult for a woman to convey what she really needs. For a woman, it is quite embarrassing to step into a lingerie store, and have the salesman or girl scan you and say ‘madam 34 B will fit you.’

That is when Zivame was conceptualized to become a lingerie store where women can understand their lingerie needs, browse through styles, order for their right size and get their order delivered at their doorstep without any embarrassment.”

Zivame started out in a small office space, and waited 5 hours for their first order to arrive – which came from Indore, and was worth Rs. 7000. Today, Zivame is catering the lingerie needs to 5 Lakh women across the country, and claim to sell 1 bra, per minute, which means 40,000 purchases in a month. The platform, which also has a mobile app at the moment, features 5000 styles, in 100 sizes, from over 50 brands including Jockey, Amante, Enamor, and other big names. They also introduced their home brand, to increase margins, and have raised multiple rounds of funding since their launch.

Talking about the obstacles she faced while setting up the country’s first online shopping portal for lingerie, she says, “I think the initial hurdles were more to do with the category. For example, incorporating the company, getting a payment gateway or renting office space! There is so much discomfort associated with lingerie as a category even today, people are not really OK to talk about it. I remember there was always a 10 second awkward silence when we told someone that we were a lingerie company.”

Overall, Richa feels being a woman helped her immensely, since, she understood the requirements of her customer base much better. “Even today, when we get new products or brands, I think from a woman’s point of view and not a Business owner. I ask myself, do I need this product? Does it make any difference to my life? Would I pay xyz amount for the product? Answers to these questions are the key to having a good product mix.”

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Antariksh has been gaining popularity owing to their experimentation with edgy and modern sounding rock music with mainstream Hindi music. Celebrating two years of the release of their first album, ‘Khoj’ and the release of their new single ‘Intezaar’, DU Beat got an opportunity to interview them.

Q. Let’s start by talking about how your band was formed? How did you guys end up with the name ‘Antariksh’?

A. As far as the story goes, the roots of the band were actually laid way before Antariksh was formed. From 2006 to 2008, Varun Rajput and Mridul Ganesh (Former singer of the band) used to play in a local Progressive Rock band called Feedback, and GT used to play for Prestorika around the same time. However, post college days, music took a back seat as we ventured into the corporate world to earn our bread and butter. However, a few years later, stars somehow aligned again, and coincidentally, both Mridul and Varun happened to quit their management consulting jobs around the same time in 2012 to work on more creative projects. At the same time Varun and Gurtej had been having conversations about starting a new project and were longing to get back to music – fans of similar kinds of music, the three of us got together, to jam casually and write a few tunes. It wasn’t long when we realized that we’d written 3 very cool songs (Na Jaane Kyun, Tum, and Dheere Dheere). At this moment, the timing just seemed right – we decided to get onto unfinished Business and took the plunge to record and produce an album for Antariksh. This is when we started looking for a drummer and a bass player. A friend connected us to Vipul, who was studying at NSIT at that time and was a great fit into the set-up. We jammed a few times – there was an immediate connection, since there has been no looking back.

As for the name, we thought of several funny and weird names, but stuck with Antariksh as it was the only one, which wasn’t repulsed by anyone. Ha!

Q. Did ‘Dheere Dheere’, your first single, receive the kind of response that you were expecting?

A. To be honest, we were very skeptical before releasing it, for the kind of experimentation, we were up to – fortunately it received a great response. To our surprise, we got around 150 shares on the day of its release and much appreciation. That’s when we realized that we had something going and started taking the project more seriously. The song later on went on to be shortlisted at VIMA India Awards and was nominated for VIMA Asia Awards.

Q. How is Antariksh different from other bands in India? Where do you see yourself in the next few years?

A. For starters, we believe we have a very unique and eclectic sound for Hindi music considering our background and influences. Besides that, we have a lot of talent within the band which helps us treat Antariksh like a Startup and manage everything on our own, whether that’s Design work, Marketing, PR, Business development, recording, video editing, etc. Also, we believe, we’re very sincere and disciplined when it comes to doing anything with Antariksh, whether that’s writing new songs, producing, rehearsing or releasing. In the next few years, we wish to see ourselves as the pioneers and the front-runners of Indian rock music.

Q. What is the state of Indian music scene, according to you? What advice would you like to give the musicians who are still trying to find a way in the Indian music scene?

A. We believe it’s a great time to be a professional musician. Indie music has changed as well grown exponentially in the last 4-5 years, and so have the opportunities. However, there’s a catch – although, the total opportunities, gigs, music festivals have gone up, so has the demand for commercial music or let’s say cover songs. Unfortunately, that has led to most musicians give up on their original music and passion to do music and rather, just form cover bands to keep earning their bread and butter. And you can’t blame the bands or the venues entirely, though. That’s how the scene has evolved. So, yes it’s great that the overall Indie music scene is growing; however, it will take a lot more time for the audience, as well as venues to start accepting and appreciating original music than lining up stupid Sufi Nights, where you have shabby musicians getting together to screw up beautiful songs by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the likes, while drunk uncles and aunties dance to them like there’s no tomorrow. What musicians need to realize is that such audience will drink and dance irrespective of who’s playing, so in the long run the musicians are doing themselves more harm than good. I think what has not grown well is the state of radio – we feel radio is a great medium for discovering good music as well as popularizing music. However, it has not picked up Indie music as much it should have. Let’s see what the future holds.

What we’d like to advise our fellow musicians would be to create quality music. Work hard and stick around for long enough to make an impact. And be nice to each other and everyone around.

Q. Can you list down some bands you all look up to?

A. Amongst Indian bands and musicians, we love stuff by Thermal and a Quarter, Amit Trivedi, AR Rahman. Amongst bands outside of India, a few that we all love would be Pain of Salvation, Dream Theater, Iron Maiden, and so many more.

Q. What would be your fondest memory as a band and your best gig? What is the concept of your first album? Have you had moments of struggle, where you felt like it isn’t working out?

A. The fondest memory of us working together as a band would be the release of our first album, Khoj. ‘Khoj’ is about a search for identity, a quest to understand our own nature. The album touches various themes such as ethics, identity crises, hope, greed, chaos and realization. When we launched the album, we got a great response to the music; however, it took a while for the concerts to pick up. That really was a frustrating period for the band because we thought we’d put in our blood, sweat and tears into this album, and gigs still didn’t pick up for the next two months. Fortunately, everything literally changed overnight exactly 3 months after the release, and suddenly, we were playing all across the country. In hindsight, we think it was just the amount of time that was needed for our music to actually reach out to people – something like a gestation period. Thankfully, since then, the band’s following and concerts have grown exponentially, and we hope to continue growing as musicians as well as a band. Talking about our best gig, it has to be the gig at Carmel Junior college, Jamshedpur – the loudest and most musical audience ever.

Q. Tell us something about your new single. What are some of your upcoming projects? Do you think that colleges with their fest season and competitions, serves as a good platform for talented musicians?

A. We recently released Intezaar, a song that has waited for over five years for its release. It was composed in 2010 when we were working on a couple of soundtracks for a movie called The Bet. We’re super excited to see the response to the song, as it’s very different from what we normally compose as Antariksh. Other than that, we’re planning to come up with the 2nd album early next year. Also, October and November is all set for tour to celebrate 3 years of Antariksh.

Talking about colleges, specifically Delhi University and its competitions as a platform for young bands, we believe it’s absolutely great. We’ve seen it act as a foundation for musical careers of so many talented musicians. In fact, we were judging a few competitions recently, it was great to see some absolutely amazing bands coming out of DU. Our recent favourite bands from DU would be Hansraj Projekt, and RaagLeela.

Written by: Sudisha Misra for DUbeat. 

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