Dhruvi Trivedi, a PGDM student at St. Kabir Institute of Professional Studies (SKIPS), had the opportunity to intern as a Human Resources Assistant with Columbia Asia, an international private healthcare company with an extensive network of hospitals across Asia.
Learning HR skills in a hospital has to be a trial by fire, but for Dhruvi, her summer internship experience was an incisive one. “Hospitals can be tough, intense, and hard places to work in. However, interesting employee engagement can help the staff feel driven and bounce back at work, “elaborates Dhruvi. She recently returned to her classroom with an insightful paper on “Employee Engagement,” an in-depth research project that heavily draws from her stint at Columbia Asia.
Finding her feet in the corporate world
Dhruvi remembers her first day of the internship, when her mentor made her feel at ease and acquainted her with different departments of the hospital. Since then, she went on to handle various responsibilities like recruitment, onboarding, documentation, and more for the organization. “The kind of exposure and learning I experienced was tremendous.” There were new challenges every day, and I kept learning from them. There was a day when I had to handle the whole department single-handedly. By the time I wrapped my work, I felt an incredible sense of satisfaction, “adds Dhruvi, with a broad smile on her face.”
Building blocks for a professional mindset
During her internship, Dhruvi had to interact with GMs, HODs, and top-level management of the hospital. It not only built her confidence but also helped her understand the significance of communication within a professional set-up. It was then that my classroom experiences at SKIPS – pgdm college in ahmedabad came in handy. Having attended innumerable group discussions, extempore, mock interviews, and team presentations at SKIPS, I felt prepared enough to face the senior professionals, “explains Dhruvi.
A Look into the Project
Dhruvi’s internship gave her practical exposure to different areas of HR and offered her valuable insights. She used her understanding of recruitment, onboarding, documentation, and all that she experienced at Columbia Asia to make a compelling project around the necessity of “employee engagement” in hospitals. Her work points out how centralization doesn’t always help and that decentralisation is often crucial to maintaining a company’s credibility and keeping employees happy. When asked about any particular message she might want to share with her juniors, Dhruvi drew
from her own experience and remarks- “You have to separate your ego from work or it can become difficult to maintain healthy professional relationships. No work is small when the learning is big!”
