Friday, August 23, 2013

Internships in India for international students - study abroad in India

Internships Globally - Searching through the maze

Here is some information on how to find internships in India, especially for international students.  Several of these internships are part of a study abroad program.

Here are some portals that list several global internships that are available in India for international students:
www.goabroad.com
www.studyabroad.com
www.gooverseas.comwww.iiepassport.org

www.goabroad.com lists about 205 internship programs in India from 73 organizations.  In this site, search is possible only by country and subject area.  For example, there are 17 internship programs in Information Systems in India offered by 12 organizations.  Cost or fees for the program is not a search criteria.  Similarly, there is no search criteria for Paid or unpaid internships or for scholarships.  These additional search criteria would make the site more friendly for students.

www.studyabroad.com lists 56 internship programs in India.  Out of these, only 4 are internships in Information Systems.  Here again, you cannot search by additional criteria such as whether they are paid/unpaid internships and by the fee/cost or scholarships.

www.gooverseas.com has 43 internship listings for India.  This site is driven by reviews submitted by those who have attended these programs.  This site also does not provide for narrowing down the search by cost or stipend.

www.iiepassport.org is a site maintained for The Institute for International Education (IIE).  This site lists 35 internship programs in India.  Out of these 35 programs, 11 of them offer scholarships.  Of these, only 2 programs are semester length programs and that cost less than $15,000 for the entire semester costs.  Only one of the programs is in the Informations Systems field.  Clearly, this level of search granularity helps study abroad advisors and students to identify programs that are suited to them.  IIEPASSPORT.ORG site can be searched by Country, Term, Format, Language, Subject, Level, Cost and Scholarship.

www.goabroad.com has the largest number of listings - 3668 internships from 814 organizations worldwide.  Out of these 3,668 internships, only 205 are in India.  www.iiepassport.org has 1,067 internships worldwide.  www.studyabroad.com and www.gooverseas.com do not provide a feature to search by internships worldwide; you can only search by a country or region.

Several providers/programs are listed in all these 4 portals and so there is considerable overlap.  However, the sheer number of listings over 3,600 in goabroad.com demonstrates the growing interest in internships among students.  But, if we search for business oriented internships, there are only less than 1,000 programs.  This could be due to the fact that most business schools do not offer internships for credit.


Most of these internships are stand alone programs offering only internship experience.  These are offered by commercial companies who are in the placement service and they do not necessarily offer internship for academic credit.  For the typical student, however, what matters is the combination of academic course work and an academic internship for credit over the summer or a semester.  Quite a few programs offer such an academic semester program with credits for internship.

We, at the National Management School, offer an internship program for business school students who major in Management Information Systems.  This is a 15-credit Semester Abroad program in which 6 credits are toward a 300 hour paid internship at Capgemini and 9 credits are from 3 courses.  Not only is this a paid internship, the total cost for the student including international air fare, visa, academic tuition fee, housing, meals, travel, etc. comes to less than $12,500.  A matching scholarship offered by our partners brings the cost down to about $10,500.  The whole idea is to make the cost of this program almost the same as the in-state cost so that for the student there is tremendous value.  The University at Albany is the partner who awards the credits and transcripts to the students.

We hope to expand this program to other majors in business schools in the near future.



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