00:15Hi, I'm Tanvi Chheda, and
I'm doing a PhD in geology.
00:21In summer 2019, I interned with
00:24Professional Marketing Services
Group Africa, in Nairobi, Kenya.
00:29I was with them for about two months.
00:31Professional Marketing Services Group
has been around for more than 20 years.
00:36They were mostly into marketing,
00:38but now they're also into
merchandising in supermarkets.
00:42So, things like stocking of products
anywhere from milk to satellite
00:48decoders in various supermarket
chains in Kenya and Rwanda.
00:53I am a geologist, so I study rocks and
00:58the Earth, but
on the side I do computing stuff.
01:01So, almost every summer I do
internships related to programming.
01:07I have interned for large corporations,
01:10typically more than 20,000 people,
with more systems set up already.
01:15And I was considering this summer doing
something a little bit different,
01:20where a role would involve
something less defined, perhaps.
01:24Something where systems
aren't set up as well.
01:27Little bit like a startup experience.
01:30And I did have some US offers, but
I think the location was really enticing.
01:37And I wanted to experience not
just visiting another country, but
01:41really just living there, working there,
seeing what daily life is like,
01:46and what professional life
is like in another culture.
01:51The company has about 400 ground
staff who work in the supermarket.
01:58The way they had been keeping
track of inventory and
02:01stocking was through WhatsApp messages.
02:04So, they would message their managers
saying, hey, did we just run out of milk?
02:09Or a large piece of our
inventory is now expiring?
02:14So this is a huge risk,
we need lesser demand or lesser supply.
02:19There was no way of keeping
track of any of this.
02:22When PMS Group made a report
to the milk company,
02:26they would have to find pictures and
data by reading through messages.
02:31So, I made an app to log
all of this every day.
02:35And then, it's just easy to generate
a monthly Excel report about
02:40your everyday sale, your attendance.
02:43The employees can apply for
leave inside the app.
02:47Before, what they had to do is come
into the PMS office in Nairobi.
02:52So they would have to basically take
half a day out to travel there,
02:55fill out a form for
approval from the manager to take a leave.
02:59And now, that happens in the app, and
03:01the number of days that they did
not go to work is also tracked.
03:07In a large corporation, even when the same
period of time in a period of two months,
03:11if you make a change, it's going to be
a very, very small part of the system.
03:15And it won't change the operations
of the organization as
03:20a whole that much, while here,
the impact is visible.
03:25So, that feels like knowing
the results of what you've done.
03:29Sometimes you never find out the results,
what you did, was it value-adding or not?
03:34Because you leave after an internship.
03:37While here you see the impact.
03:39The skill set I learned from this
experience are something that can be
03:43applied to practically any industry.
03:46So, app development but
also product management.
03:49And I was always intrigued about it.
03:52I thought I wanted to do it, but
03:54actually doing it tells you what it
feels like on a day-to-day basis.
03:59After doing it, I realized that,
yes, I do love it.
04:02And if I ever have to commit to it for
a full time job for
04:05a number of years, I'm glad I did this
to know what the role feels like.
04:11One of the hikes we went to was
called Mount Suswa of Victory.
04:16It's managed by the Maasais,
and we did a 14 kilometer hike.
04:22Which was pretty nice, fun and
saw this crater created by a volcano.
04:28It was so perfectly round, and you could
walk on its rim and see the entire rim.
04:35And then we went into caves that
were formed from its lava tubes and
04:40saw a species of bat that was
endemic only to that place.
04:47To be able to write something from scratch
and create it completely yourself is
04:52really fun, because then you can
make it exactly the way you want it.
04:56Considering, of course,
how everyone else wants it to be, but
05:00you make it in a way that you think
is the best for the organisation,
05:04as opposed to just making tiny changes
on something that's already legacy and
05:08you don't want to change
the whole system now.
05:12So that freshness and being able to create
something from scratch was just so joyful.
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