The Indo-American Chamber of Commerce placed several interns at a number of different companies in Houston including Compaq and Enron Corporation.  Below, you will find profiles and descriptions from some of the IACCGH Summer 2000 Interns.  The following students are profiled:

Avanti Kulkarni

My name is Avanti Kulkarni and I am a second year at the University of Chicago and am studying economics.  I spent this past summer working in Open Market Operations in Compaq Computer Corp.'s Corporate Treasury department.  I learned a great deal about the world of corporate finance - commercial paper investment, foreign exchange investment, and portfolio management.  I did a cost-benefit analysis project on the outsourcing of offshore portfolios, which was really interesting and taught me a lot about economics and finance, in addition to how to give effective presentations.  My summer experience at Compaq was wonderful - I had so much fun, gained invaluable insight into corporate life, made excellent connections.  It was highly rewarding and I am very glad that I was able to do it.

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Akash Gupta

I am a junior majoring in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.  As an intern at Compaq this summer, I worked in the Internet Services and Operations (ISO) group in Information Management.  As part of the internship, I researched internet traffic use for Compaq employees.  The various Compaq sites I researched included Sydney, Munich, Reading, Tokyo, Singapore, and numerous US locations.  This included searching business related and non-business related web sites.  I increased my knowledge by understanding the use of proxies and the setup of the Compaq infrastructure.  Throughout this project, I also got to participate in management meetings and video conferences.

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Joy Wangdi

Over the summer of 2000, I did my work experience at Enron. My work experience at Enron involved assisting Managers in the Marketing and Public Relations team and the Social Responsibility team for Asia and Africa. I was very impressed with my work experience as I found the job challenging and interesting.

My work experience at Enron involved working on a compensation packet for various stakeholders in India. Enron would be building a pipeline across Southern India and needed advice on how to go compensating various stakeholders such as landowners, villages and communities. My internship involved doing research on various other energy/pipeline corporations that had constructed pipelines across countries and had required “right of way”. The research included sifting through vast amount of material on compensation, some of which was relevant and some, which was not. When I found some information, which could be used, I then had to do an analysis between the new data and my project. By researching similar projects in the past and doing a comparison, I was able to formulate a best practices list of mistakes that we could learn from and avoid in the future.

Another project I worked on was coming up with a Corporate Social Responsibility Program for Enron in India. This included working on a presentation to present to the CEO of Enron India, Mr. Sanjay Bhatnagar. For this particular project, I worked with the Manager for Social Responsibility. The work included looking at past Corporate Social Responsibility programs for various other companies and also looking at research by non-governmental organizations such as the Prince of Wales Business Leaders forum, Price Waterhouse Coopers surveys on the role of non-governmental organizations etc.

As part of Marketing and Public Relations, I worked on a business proposal for Enron Corporation, which was about how to distribute the Corporation funds to various pilot projects in Asia and Africa. There were 9 projects and each was valued between $15,000 and $18,000. This included stating the objective of each project, discussing how the funds were going to be distributed to various activities within the project. I would also have to do research on the various non-governmental organizations that we would need to go through in order to help us carry out the project.

I would like to thank the IACCGH for this opportunity and would encourage all students to take this opportunity.

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Puja Verma

I am a junior Finance major at The University of Texas at Austin. This past summer, I interned at Compaq Computer Corporation in the Information Managment: Supply Chain group. The work I did was more accounting oriented, because I was basically just working on Excel. But the whole intern experince at Compaq was wonderful. Compaq is one of the few companies that really takes good care of its interns. They had so many different activities planned for us the entire time. Plus, by going through Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, I met the other interns in the program, and I ended up becoming really close to these amazing people. I definitely recommend applying for this awesome program that Indo-American has started. I don't mean to sound cliche-ish, but it's great work experience, a great way to network, and you may end up making friends for life. 

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Manoj Gandhi

I am going to be a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, and I'm majoring in computer and telecommunications engineering. During this summer working at Compaq, I have been working on Compaq's intrusion and detection program. My project involves testing software, finding holes in Compaq's intranet, and tracking intrusions into Compaq's servers. Right now Compaq is in the stages of finding a suitable enterprise software for the monitoring and scanning of intrusions into Compaq's gateways. So far we have been testing Black Ice software for remote users and ISS Real Secure for the enterprise system. I have learned many interesting things on the hardware and software side of Compaq and Digital computers, and this internship has also given me the opportunity to work with people who are willing to help and teach whenever I had a problem or did not understand something. My manager explained the business side the project and how Digital India would play a role in the operations and handling of global internet security. Overall this has been a wonderful experience.

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Dia Nath

(coming soon)

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IACCGH Internship Program