Lived Experiences of Interns in Indian Corporate Context: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the University Grants Commission (UGC) have made internship engagement mandatory across higher education programmes. Internships play crucial role in students’ career as they allow them to translate their academic knowledge into practical workplace, and develop professional competencies among students. Despite such growing importance of internships, there is scarce of research examining interns lived experiences within Indian corporate settings. Keeping the research objectives of present study in view, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) has been employed to explore the lived experiences of seven student interns who recently completed internships across various Indian corporate organizations, MNCs, startups, and NGOs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and five key themes emerged - hierarchical inequality in internship culture, incompatibility between contribution and compensation, need for constructive supervision and credibility validation, peer Support and biofeedback as coping mechanisms, and interns’ recommendation for Indian corporate context improvement. The findings of the present study foreground the need of structured policies and strategies that could create supportive, collaborative and could enhance overall learning outcomes of interns within Indian corporate