Kovai.co internships continue to be one of the most sought-after programs for engineering, tech, and marketing graduates in and around Coimbatore. With our extremely well-structured internship program and a work culture that supports freshers, we attract highly skilled and passionate students from institutions in the city. We have had more than 160+ interns joining Kovai.co’s various departments—technical and non-technical since 2019. Almost all of them have been absorbed by us as permanent employees.
Vishaalini Manikandan and Surya Murugan are the latest stars to graduate out of our internship program. Both of them joined our growing data science team as interns in October. Vishaalini, a computer science engineering student from Kumaraguru College of Technology, hardly knew anything about data science when she began her internship. “I was struggling to find a field to specialize in. All I knew was that I did well in a paper on data mining and algorithms,” she says. “All my knowledge was theoretical”.
As she completed her internship in April-mid, this graduate yet to complete her college education helped ship three new AI features. The features include building a code separately to evaluate Eddy, AI writer, and converting Text-to-Table.
I also worked Multilingual support for Ask Eddy Assistive Search, AI Summariser, and AI Writer use cases, which are still in the development stage, says proudly.
Surya on the other hand, was already pursuing his B Tech Artificial Intelligence and Data Science degree at Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology. “I had always been interested in data science, statistics and finding insights. I also realized there was a lot of scope in data science,” he says. “For me applying to an internship program in Kovai.co, one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the region was a natural choice. I had also read and heard about many interns going on to becoming very successful within the organization,” he adds.
Despite studying data science and AI for close to four years, Surya quickly realized that most of his knowledge from his course was theoretical. “With AI and data science being relatively new courses, knowledge was theoretical. However, here I learned to use RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to work on real-world problems,” says the final-year student.
At the end of his six months at Kovai.co, this youngster had done a lot of foundational work on our in-built AI assistant Eddy, making it a lot more accurate with answers. “Using RAG I helped fine tune prompts for Eddy, helping the AI powered assistant learn what articles it can refer to while answering questions so answers can be as accurate as possible,” says Surya. “I also helped in re-ranking of keywords,” he adds.
Kovai.co was not Vishaalini’s nor Surya’s first internship. “We had done internships before but it was fully remote,” says Surya. “During my internship with a US-based company, I could interact with the team only once a week. Progress and learning was also slower,” recollects Vishaalini.
However, the work culture at Kovai.co allowed us to have continuous discussions with our teammates especially our head, Selvaraaju Murugesan and Pavithira Rajendran. They helped focus our learnings better and implement them almost immediately in Document360.
For the students who joined Kovai.co with minimal exposure to the core field of data science but a lot of passion, working on cutting-edge technology like LLM (Large Language Models), RAG showed them the true potential and impact of AI. “The thing I love most in data science is getting insights. Cleaning the data and then using the best tech to get such critical insights is a thrill,” says Vishaalini who is now all set to pursue her Masters in Computer science and Data Science in Ireland.
Surya says his six-month internship was a perfect introduction to using data science and AI in the real world. “At work, there is a lot of self-learning. We continuously learn by referring to online sources as much as possible and then referencing it with our teammates. We realized that Open AI is so much more than just ChatGPT. Most importantly, we learn to look beyond our perspectives and look at things based on user requirements and product manager’s capabilities before we build features,” he added.
Surya is all set to join Kovai.co’s data science team as a data analyst.
Conclusion
The mentorship provided by Kovai.co’s leadership is a significant confidence booster for freshers, reflecting the company’s commitment to supporting interns. “From bringing innovative ideas and working on crucial product features, our interns have been positively impacting our product portfolio, enriching our projects,” says Selvaraaju. “Their passion to tackle business challenges is always inspiring,” he says signing off.
