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Sonali Roychowdhury

Vice President for Human Resources, Product Supply and Labor Relations, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (AMA)

Former Human Resources Intern, 1998, India

What was the feeling like before the internship began?

Honestly, the first feeling was nervousness. I didn’t know much about Procter & Gamble, so it was all about discovery and finding out what it was like to really work in a big company. Once I kind of kept in Day 1, I realized that if you are willing to open yourself to new learnings - there were a lot of people who were helping, great coaches, mentors, the kind of work I ended up doing was very different than something I had experienced before – then you really got a chance to contribute. It became a great learning experience for me over those 8 weeks.

What was your project and how did you feel about it?

I thought that when you’re an intern, you’ll go and get to do something small and no one’s going to worry too much about it. In reality, my project was to look at the whole outsourcing of a lot of our HR processes in India and it came with a budget of almost a million dollars. When you’re doing something like that, you realize this is something that the company takes seriously. I walked for 8 weeks in terms of identifying what are the areas that we needed to look at outsourcing, what was the latest technology out there that we could use, speak to consultants, other companies, leadership teams to figure out how to bring it to life and pretty much execute or at least start things in motion within the time that I was there. There was never a dull moment, but I think it taught me everything from figuring out how to take an idea into execution and getting others along with you, especially when you don’t know them.

What was the support you received to accomplish your project?

The first is I had an amazing guide or coach. He was there for me from day one, answering all my questions even if I thought they were silly questions. He set expectations right in the beginning and helped bust barriers if I was not sure how to get things done. I think that was the biggest help.

The second thing that I found very useful was a very clear workplan which tells you exactly what you need to do and by when. You have flexibility, but it gives you some sort of a structure to work with. When you’re a student just out of university, that structure helps.

The third is a great branch of other interns who I think became lifelong friends. We partied together, we had late night project meetings together, and over time, many of us joined P&G and are still here. It’s been a lifelong friendship which continues to be a support until today.

The last is just the values of the company. To come in as a fresh student with no experience and to be given that responsibility of managing almost a million-dollar project in your role is truly special. Totally unexpected for me, but I think that it gave me a lot of ownership and I tried to do my best to make sure that I could deliver on the trust the company had.

What was the most memorable moment in your internship?

The most memorable time for me was about 4 weeks into my project when I had to negotiate kind of like a contract with a big consultant and I was representing P&G alone in that meeting which had even their senior partner there. To be able to do that was an amazing high. That, to me, was my most memorable moment in the project.

What was your favorite thing about your internship?

My favorite thing about the internship is the trust that I found during that entire time from my coach,  from the leaders who were there, from others who worked in HR, from people in different functions that I worked with. Everyone just wanted to help me succeed and that went a long way in getting rid of the nervousness that I had in the first few days.

I still remember my first day in P&G as an intern and today, I’m a Vice President in the company. And I can say that I owe it to the coaching, the mentorship, the friendship, and all the trust that I got and the new experiences over my career that have made me who I am today.