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General Mills Internship — II

by Abhigyan Bafna

This post is the second part of my journey with General Mills, where I’ll dive into my internship experience. If you haven’t yet, feel free to check out Part 1, where I discuss the interview process here.

The summer internship was for two months from June 3rd to August 2nd 2024. It was an experience packed with a learnings. I got to meet new people, hear fresh perspectives and work with technologies that I hadn’t even heard of.

Index

  1. Day One and Me
  2. Corporate Life
  3. My Project
  4. The Assessment
  5. My Learnings
  6. Thank You

Day One and Me

The first day of the internship is a very exciting and nervous time. I dressed up in my best formals and left home two hours earlier than the reporting time.

Caught a local train to Kanjurmarg and throughout my journey I kept picturing what the day would be like. What would I work on? Would we get new laptops? How would the other interns be?

To pass time and also ensure that I made a good impression, I wrote this elevator pitch on my journey -

Hey, I’m Abhigyan. A third year engineering student at Thadomal Shahani Engineering College.I like to solve problems and build stuff using technology. Like recently I built a restaurant management web app for a client. Apart from this another thing about me is that I love to gain new experiences, like currently I am comfortable with web development and hence am exploring and learning about the AI/ML space. Because of this nature, one quirky thing about me is that I’ll try out at least one new item whenever eating at a restaurant.

It took me one and a half hour to reach Hiranandani, Powai. Glad I left early. After completing all the security checks, I was directed to a training room with the other interns while we waited to start.

The room was pretty silent and all of us who reached early were just sitting idly, making some small (slightly awkward) talk and browsing through our phones. Soon we received a warm welcome from the Early Career Program team (GM’s dedicated team to look over interns as well as freshers hired as FTE’s).

The plan for the day was to just have a slow and smooth onboarding for us. I found it very surprising, that we weren’t going to do any work at all for the day. We were made to play fun ice-breaker games and once we were all comfortable we moved onto something I never expected to be doing at a F500 - Drawing.

There were 20 of us in total. We were divided into five groups and were given a huge chart paper to make something together as a team. Naturally all of us got a little competitive and took quite a bit of time. It was really fun to come up with creative ideas, sketch, draw, and add colour to our creations. I can’t even remember the last time I sat down to draw before this!

After a couple of time extensions to perfect our masterpieces we were all done. We broke for lunch and on return we presented our creative work turn by turn. In my team, we drew our college buildings and had a General Mills brand on top of each one -

Next we were given a tour of the entire office and I was surprised to see a gym in office, I used it a few times during the internship. Then we got our laptops which took a while to set up due to all the proprietary software to be installed.

For the final event of the day we got assigned to teams! I was assigned to the integrations team and my project was in the API Development domain. I was a little bummed out cause I was interested to explore more about the AI Domain but at the end of the day, I was excited to work on a real world project! This is also when I met Pradnya, Joel and Aditi - the other three people who were assigned to the integrations team. It was a little awkward at first but it disappeared in no time. We even had this crazy outing in the rains of Mumbai.

This picture does not convey it but it rained pretty hard that day. (Coming from a Mumbaikar).

Anyways, coming back to the first day. We created some WhatsApp groups and left around 5pm. It was a pretty good day but I still felt a little weird. I was expecting a very different environment, something like the the traditional one we usually see in movies / skits. Instead there was very little work done on the first day, everything was chill and slow. Heck, I did not even have a good understanding on the project I’d be working on!

On my way back home, this somehow triggered a lot of overthinking - Is corporate life really chill like this? If everything moves so slow, will I even be able grow? What if I don’t like going this slow in my career? Is corporate life not my cup of tea? If I don’t like it, what will I do!?

I didn’t realise it back then, but I was feeling anxious about stepping into something new.

Corporate Life

If I spend detailing every day like above, this will get boring very quickly. So let’s condense it into the interesting bits -

Meeting People

General Mills actively pushed us to leverage our time with them by meeting people. This was exciting cause I met people from different backgrounds, got to know about their work and learnt at least one thing new along the way.

I was usually doing this socialising with my group and there wasn’t much time. So we made a list and met a LOT of people. Our reach extended to the UK Office of General Mills!

The Interns

We were a group of 20 interns, each bringing something unique to the table - our backgrounds, perspectives, cultures, and thoughts varied widely. Despite all these differences, we found ourselves gelling really well.

At work we learnt about each others tech interests, tried solving each others bugs and also shared about our past work. We also went out for bowling, celebrated birthdays, visited Marine Drive, and even solved an escape room together (my personal favourite). I had a really great time meeting them, it reminded me of the fact that everyone has at least something to offer -

A wholesome video of some interns dancing to random mall music while we waited for our Ubers for the last time✨

The Changes

In college as a student, life had a very hazy routine for me. While the lectures and college timings were fixed but for the rest of my I tried to squeeze in the 2000 pending tasks on my to-do-list. This is a reason why my life as a student did not have much structure and varied from day to day.

Suddenly as my internship began, there was a huge influx of structure in my day. The usual day went like -

  1. Wake Up -> Gym -> Morning Chores
  2. Get Ready -> Breakfast -> Commute
  3. Work -> Socialise -> Coffee -> Work
  4. Commute -> Unwind -> Dinner
  5. Personal Projects / Reading -> Sleep

This structure might sound boring but it felt pretty good to have throughout the internship and of course, there was Saturday and Sunday to add some uncertainty to life.

I’ve always wanted to do something in tech. since my childhood and hence work did not feel like a burden but something to look forward to. I got to learn new concepts, new technologies, meet people in tech. and ask them about their work. Ohh, and also FREE Coffee! XD.

Coming to General Mills specific changes, I’m pretty sure that the work life balance I felt is rare. I mean they don’t have a strict dress code, don’t enforce strict punch-in and out timings and have policies that make a lot of sense. We even were actively told by our team members to go out and enjoy on weekends instead of working. In short I’d say, they place a lot of trust in people <3.

My Project

The nerd in me loves this section. I don’t think I’ll be allowed to divulge everything about it for obvious reasons but I’ll try my best!

Integrations Team

The integrations team is responsible for making different technologies talk to each other and in todays world we want our phone to talk to our watches, computer, car, home, electronics and I’m sure the list does not end here. One of the techniques to do this is, creating a middle-man (interface) which acts like a translator between two platforms. Its called Application Programming Interface or API.

The Project

We were tasked to create a couple of APIs which help in communications between GM’s systems and an external shipping system. To do this we learnt about API led connectivity, messaging services, notification systems and API architectures. We did not have time to go in-depth of all of topics and services but we developed an understanding of their working and focused on the specific APIs we were tasked to create.

I had experience working with Javascript and Python to build APIs for web applications but at GM I was introduced to MuleSoft. It’s a low-code platform to develop APIs.

Honestly, it took me a while to learn about it and get comfortable. Until that happened, every time I got stuck, I started wishing this was in Python or JS. Eventually, I got the hang of it and started having fun!

Once I was having fun, I started exploring MuleSoft in-depth and even created a side project. I developed this API which fetched public data about different General Mills brands and returned them in a structured JSON format.

It wasn’t easy, the tough part was creating a custom java class to interpret the html files, extract data and return structured JSON files back to the flow but once I figured it out, I was really happy! I did host this project, don’t know how long will they stay this way, but go ahead and give it a try -

EndPoint 1 (Returns a list of brands) - These demo Mulesoft endpoints went offline after a while. Leaving them in for reference.

https://genmills-brands-629qve.5sc6y6-4.usa-e2.cloudhub.io/api/brands

EndPoint 2 (Returns details about brand) -

https://genmills-brands-629qve.5sc6y6-4.usa-e2.cloudhub.io/api/brands/annies

The Assessment

At the end of our two months at General Mills we had our final assessment. The one where we present everything to the leadership team.

We spent a LOT of time perfecting our presentation. Firstly, we did a couple of demo presentations with our team to get feedback and also took in external feedbacks. Iterated our presentation again and again and again according to the them.

We seriously must’ve done like five iterations (one was through an entire Sunday, Yeah I hate that one :X). The four of us only stopped iterating when there wasn’t any time left. We then started doing mock rounds, timed and recorded ourselves.

Finally on D-Day, time went really slowly and it did not help that our group was the last to present. Eventually, we made it and with all that preparation, we did great! You already know the result of it :)

My Learnings

Working at corporate was uncharted territory for me, and such paths usually lead to valuable insights. Here are mine -

1. Thinking from multiple perspectives.

In college my process of building a project was just think of a problem and start coding as soon as possible. Doing this led to later realisations of - “Ohh, maybe I could’ve done this in a more efficient way” or used a more suitable tech-stack.

Sometimes i’ve also given up half-way on the project. The way to improve on this is define the project well. Ask a lot of questions like -

  • Why am i even building this?
  • Is this even feasible to build?
  • Do the features I have in mind are relative to solving the problem?
  • What should this feature look like when its done?
  • How should I implement this feature?

And this list keeps drilling down. We just stop at the point where we feel everything is well defined and then onto building!

1. Technology > Tool.

Most of us get comfortable with a tech stack (cough, MERN ) or a specific set of skills, and then try to mould the world around us to fit that stack.

This approach may even feel fine till the stack is relevant but what’s happening is, we’ve stopped growing and are becoming irrevant to the world around us.

The world stops for no one, so instead of falling in love with some tools. Love a domain! For example - Development, Machine Learning, AI, Cloud, etc.

The rest of my learnings all are pretty self explanatory so I’ll just list them out -

  • Have at least one unique quality that I know people know me for.
  • Understanding what the business wants is of the utmost importance.
  • Ability to collaborate, understand the bigger picture, curiosity, communication are important at corporate.
  • Ask good questions not only to people but also to AI.

Thank You

To make this such a great experience for me, there were a lot of people involved. Thank you to all of them -

Apurv Gangar, Utkarsh Patkar, Sreekant Menon, Saleha Shaikh, Kshitij Nema, Tejas Adhikari, Sushma Nair, Ketan Bhavsar.

And of course The interns 🤙🏻

Joel, Pradnya, Aditi, Dhurv, Deepika, Deepanshi, Mahek, Anas, Emin, Vaishnavi, Ishita, Kopal, Ankur, Divya, Omkar, Pranav, Reanne, Sejal and Yashveer. (Yeah, I am not attaching 19 LinkedIn profiles XD)

PS - Finally! after a month of starting to write this, I’m done. Writing is really fun, but also tiring and SO time consuming!

Until next time, Peace!