In the series of the big shot companies coming for the internship season, the fifth name to strike the IAS portal was Transocean. It came for intern selection around the end of August. Here is a brief on the unforgettable experience I had.

Transocean is an offshore drilling contractor, actually one of the largest in the world. The selection procedure for the company involves resume shortlisting, a group activity, a group discussion and a personal interview, phew!

The company looks for students with remarkable position of responsibilities, decision making personality and readiness to take initiatives. A low CPI won’t be a big deterrent if you are able to convince them about your other qualities. Eventually, I was selected for the internship and with the start of summers, I was in the financial powerhouse of the country, Mumbai.

We were greeted by a luxurious penthouse and the Transocean office was equally astonishing. The profile offered to interns at Transocean is primarily operations. On the very first day we were introduced to our mentors. I was supposed to work with the uber cool Y’5 KGPian, Gyanendra Tripathi.

The work that you do there requires a perfect blend of your technical and managerial skills. You are given live projects that put general engineering, people handling skills and out of the box thinking to test.

I worked on three major projects. The first two projects required fundamental mechanical and electrical engineering knowledge along with good people handling skills so as to actually implement them. This was the best part of this internship. We had to deal with numerous service providing companies to discuss our proposed technical solution and then negotiate with them for the final execution. These meetings necessitate a very good technical understanding thus making it an excellent techno-management job.

My third project was completely unconventional. I was asked to find the root causes (sounds fancier!) of the inventory increase of my rig. I had to look at asset management with a whole different perspective. I did a historical analysis of purchase orders and issues, and related it with operational history of the rig. Basically, I matched POs worth $400 million with the operational history of 4 years to exactly find out what sort of equipment were ordered against which jobs and where can I cut around $2 million to bring my inventory under the target limit. These projects involved a lot of interaction with the rig personnel, staff at the corporate office in Houston and the service providing giants of the oil industry.

The work culture at Transocean is wonderful. Where else could I find people from different nationalities working  together in a sector that affects the global economy the most. Interns at Transocean are treated no different than any employee and people there, were really helpful. You can simply walk into anyone’s office and discuss anything you want to. The weekends were fantastic. We had some really fabulous outings, one of them being a dinner at Taj and some other equally mad parties. Oh God! Those parties..

There we met some really cool folks. Alumni from ‘96 batch or fun loving Englishmen, the list of awesome people is never ending. The awesomest of those make a cut to the 140 LADS (League of Awesome Drillers).

All in all, this was a corporate experience worth cherishing.

Written by Harshvardhan Chhangani

Vox Populi

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