My Internship Experience at Rivigo (previously TrucksFirst)

It was hot summer noon and my second to the last exam for my junior year of undergrad. As I left the examination hall after handing over my paper and checked my phone, it beeped and signaled a call that I had missed and an email regarding an opportunity to intern at TrucksFirst, later to be known as Rivigo.

I have never had a job before, and so it was exciting, albeit stressful since I had little to none interview experience. I applied to multiple opportunities, including Rivigo, a cargo service start-up with serviceability across India, and was waiting for the best offer.

I called back and scheduled the interview for the same day.

Interview

In the excitement and anxiety, I didn’t even remember the exact job description. Yet, I drove to Rivigo’s office in the hope to do my best with my resume and dressed informally, failing all the lessons I had learned to be formal and prepared in the interviews.

My to-be supervisor in the office interviewed me. He asked me some questions related to my previous projects and technical proficiency. After giving me a tour of the office, he gave me a web project to make some changes, which he later reviewed. After a couple of minutes, they asked me when I could start working.

I had my first ever job offer.

Work Experience

It was 6-days a week job, even though it didn’t feel like that because of all the fun I had doing the work that I liked. I had three projects.

Website

My first project was to build a website, which I did in PHP and HTML/CSS. I first drafted some mockups and later created a website. The most fun I had in this project was working on creating an SVG showing truck routes of the company country-wide in India.

Dashboard

The second project I worked on was a dashboard to show useful statistics based on various tracking features of the company trucks that are used for Rivigo’s logistics service. The company can use this data to understand the consumption of the resources better and optimize the routes following that.

The dashboard that I developed in PHP using data from the cloud presented it in various formats to make it easier to perform operations. It was a great learning experience working on this since it was my first experience with data science.

Android UI

Other than that, I did some graphic design to create UI mockups for Rivigo’s Android app. It was fun to work on these mockups as well. Designing these UI mocks gave me some time to look up from code editors and monospace font.

Freedom and Fun

Even though I was completely inexperienced, I always felt that my ideas were welcomed and respected which provided me a space for creativity. To enhance my experience and learning, I used to get a lot of suggestions from my supervisors and seniors. And not just work, I also had many opportunities to learn about other fields and upcoming innovations in computer science that I was not familiar with at that time.

Summary

I worked at Rivigo for a month. The environment at Rivigo was great with everyone being super supportive at any time. We not just worked together but also had coffee and lunch together, including a celebration of the birthday of one of the colleagues. Working at Rivigo was probably the best first work experience I could wish for.