My Wipro Elite internship from CGC — what I expected vs what actually happened

I got the Wipro Elite NTH offer after campus placements (7.5 LPA). Before joining full-time in July, there's a 2-month pre-joining internship. I was sent to Hyderabad. I'm from Ludhiana. I had never lived alone. This is the honest version of how those two months went.

Week 1: Orientation in a Wipro campus that is genuinely massive. You get a badge, a laptop, a mentor assigned. The mentor is a senior employee who has 15 interns assigned to them and is also trying to do their actual job. Manage your expectations about mentorship — it will not be the Netflix-documentary kind.

The project I was assigned: write automation tests for an internal portal. This is not glamorous work. But it is real work. I wrote Selenium test cases in Java, learned how their CI/CD pipeline ran. By week 3 I had written 40 test cases, 32 of which passed on the first run. The engineering lead mentioned it in a team standup.

The Hyderabad part: I lived in a paying guest near the campus with two other CGC guys who got the same posting. My monthly budget was around ₹14,000 — ₹10k stipend plus ₹4k from home. It was manageable but not comfortable.

What I learned that my degree didn't teach me: how to read an unfamiliar codebase without panicking. A senior told me: 'Find the entry point, trace one request end to end, ignore everything else for the first week.' This single piece of advice saved me. College teaches you to write code. Industry requires you to read other people's code. These are different skills.