Feature

Internship at TMIB

Nazwa Warda

INTERNSHIP during the undergraduation is a mandatory 6-credit course in IUB and a prerequisite, just prior to your bachelor's degree. It is a fully job-based intensive programme, and the internship can be considered as an On-Job training, done in any course-related firm/company, under the supervision of a top-management (both in public and private sector). Normally it lasts for ¾ months and can be even extended if the performance of the intern is more than/ above satisfactory, as evaluated by the employer.

In IUB, students peruse their internship in the financial institutions: Bank or Leasing Firms, in the Telecom Operators: GP, Bangla Link, Citycell, etc or public companies: Power Development Board, TNT. I along with 3 of my friends had the marvelous opportunity as we found ourselves finally making it through the doorstep of TMIB, AKtel, presently known as ROBI. I can still clearly picture us in the last semester of ETE (Electronics and Telecom Engineering) in the year 2007, December, waiting for a call for interview from AKtel, with an impatient heart and frantic hopes of a bright career.

And the day finally arrived; we were called for an interview after getting selected in the written test of NOC (Network Operation Center), Technical Division of TMIB; but just on that day we had our last final exam! What luck! Very fortunately our faculties and the co-coordinator themselves were so happy that they allowed us to sit for the exam at any date of convenience. The interview was great and we came back to Chittagong within the next 12 hours of attending the interview. Reason: We were told to join immediately within the next 2 days!

Thus our journey of first ever-professional experience begun with such a dramatic haste, but there was not a single drop of enthrallment missing! Yes, we were quite exhausted at the end of the four years enduring engineering tenure, but that was quite nothing to the mesmerizing challenges we knew were thrown ahead of us to grab on! Finally we reached our destination: the technical division of TMIB: NOC at Mascot Plaza, Uttara, Dhaka.

I was astonished to have found myself as the sole female identity in the whole office! But I was very much valued for the next four months in my department, more than I could imagine. There were many slots in NOC: BSS Core, NSS Core, Power and Backbone support and I was given the single responsibility of creating, updating records and maintaining a whole new database, then analyze and interpret the records for NOC's Higher Management.

The first one week was adjustment periods for the four of us: getting familiarized with the working environment, colleagues, senior management and officials, in integrating ourselves with the corporate practices and organizational cultures, and finally making it to emerge out as one of them!

My other three friends were all assigned with the power slot to handle power failures, in the network elements, realizing and identifying different fire alarms, and resolving them through sending web-sms to the zonal Engineers, at different regions of Bangladesh. Sometimes the NOC official had to run to spot and spend hours as long as 12/20 hours in resolving a critical issue: optical fiber line disruption.

So guys, you can now clearly visualize that we were actually based at the core of TMIB from where the whole network system of AKtel could be monitored, and controlled. Each and every person used to work relentlessly with full heart-felt support and dedication in providing their valued customers with their much anticipated network coverage and other value-added services at every corner of the country. I would rather say that these people with facing so many major/critical networks related problems/failures are the real super-heroes for a service-oriented industry like telecom. The general mass cannot just imagine the hard slog and the labor given to provide a clear, smooth operating service to the customers. I remember working as late as 9pm-10 pm at night, starting from 9am in the morning, when there were major node disconnection /power failure issues.

Hardly have we taken any vacation, for we used to enjoy, working and learning new things daily and also because of the fact that 'NOC never sleeps….'

I heard our supervisor telling us: 'We work every day, there is nothing called holiday in NOC, and not even on the eid days'. Indeed, true it is very much based on the fact that mobile usage and operations ever stops even on holidays and customers never stop making calls, or browsing g the net, whatever be the occasion. But even amidst such busy hours, we managed time for ourselves, roaming around in the city at night after work, occasionally stopping-over the pitha-shop sometimes visiting the residential park for an evening walk or sneaking in the lunch-break in the near-by food court.

All in all those four months, were both enthralling and a unique experience for us which I am really sure would help us in standing competitively at the core professional level, anywhere around the globe.