Beyond work & responsibilities: Intern Immersion Programme

Internships are commonly seen as an experience that allows students/graduates to take a glimpse into life behind a company. Here at Grab, various internship engagement activities are lined up to ensure that interns have an empowering, enriching and exciting internship experience.

This year, the Grab Campus Team launched an Intern Immersion Programme to allow interns to build on-ground truths and have a better understanding of our delivery- and driver- partners, and our business operations in GrabKitchen. They spent a couple of hours experiencing what our delivery-partners go through on a daily basis.

We sat down with some of our interns – Seth Khaw (Intern, Design – CX – GEL), Rohan Tharakan (Intern, Analytics – Grab Support), and Chia Si Ning (Intern, Regional BD & Partnerships) to find out about their respective immersion experiences.
Check out what the interns had to say after participating in the recent immersion programme below!

How did you feel when you heard that there will be an immersion experience during your internship?

Seth: I was intrigued by the idea of an immersion experience which creates direct impact on the ground, as it reminded me of practicums back in college that taught us the concept of servant leadership, where the goal was to serve for collective impact regardless of where you are in the community.

Si Ning: Having signed up together as a group was definitely one of the push factors, but aside from that, I thought it would be really cool to get a glimpse of the actual day-to-day/behind the scenes operation of the cloud kitchen.

What made you want to sign up?

Rohan: I signed up for the immersion with my fellow intern friends as we were all curious to learn more about the operations that go into fulfilling a Grab food delivery. We had heard a lot of fun things about the immersion program and wanted to experience it first hand. When I got to know that the Campus Team was organising an immersion program for interns, I got very excited. I was very happy that interns were given the chance irrespective of their department to learn more about the operations on the ground.

What was a memorable moment from the immersion?

Si Ning: One of the more memorable moments was when we received our first order. We chose to deliver by foot as we weren’t confident in cycling and didn’t want to risk damaging any orders. Finding the location was rather easy, but we couldn’t say the same for the slopes and the hills that we encountered. I’m sure the customers were confused when they saw three delivery-partners at their doorstep, that itself was funny to think about!

Seth: The terrain around our delivery destination consists of steep and winding slopes. Halfway through our delivery, our GPS navigation assistant directed us to an unpaved park trail around construction sites where we had to quickly figure out how to navigate through the uneven dirt path with our bikes, with $100 worth of food sitting in our bag, waiting to be delivered safe and sound.

How will this immersion impact the rest of your Grab internship?

Rohan: I have gotten a better understanding of the operations from the point of view of our delivery partners. I was able to analyse the various support features for the driver- and merchant- partners as I work with Grab Support. I developed higher respect and empathy for our delivery and merchant partners as I understood how impactful their role is for Grab to be successful.

Seth: By experiencing what it takes to make our own deliveries, this immersion has allowed me to view challenges through an empathetic lens and understand the “who” and “why” we are designing for a certain feature, and how features have been adopted in practice and the extent of their impact at launch. For instance, while taking on orders at the Grab kitchen during our immersion, we had to use a facial verification feature on the Grab Driver app in order to take on deliveries. To see the feature being used on the ground to facilitate registration with ease and efficiency helps reinforce the conviction in us to design experiences with the end-user in mind with the intent to impact and improve their navigation on the platform.

Si Ning: I always knew that being a delivery rider was tough, I only got to experience an hour of what they do on a day to day basis and I can only take my hat off to them. This job is really not an easy one and as a consumer, we should really demonstrate more patience and understanding. As a Business Development partnerships intern at Grab, it is heartening to see that we place our drivers and merchants at the forefront of what we do and I’m sure this will continue for a long time to come.

Check out https://grab.careers/teams/campus/ for all our internship and early career opportunities.