BANGALORE, INDIA, August 9, 2005: This summer, Omar Maldonado and Erik Simonsen, both students at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, did something different. Bypassing internship opportunities on Wall Street, just a subway ride away from their Greenwich Village campus, they went to India to spend the summer at an outsourcing company in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi. “The India opportunity grabbed me,” said Mr. Maldonado, a Boston native whose family is from the Dominican Republic. “I wanted to get a global feel for investment banking and not just a Wall Street perspective.” He and Mr. Simonsen, both 27, are spending three months at Copal Partners, an outsourcing firm with 100 analysts. It produces merger and acquisition pitch books and provides equity and credit analysis and other research to global banks and consultant groups, including those on Wall Street. Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen, of Riverside, Calif., are part of a virtual invasion of India by American students. Graduate students from top schools in the United States, most from master of business administration programs, are vying for internships at India’s biggest private companies.
For many, outsourcing companies are the destinations of choice. India is not just a line on an American student’s resume, said Kiran Karnik, president of the outsourcing industry trade body, Nasscom, “but also culturally fulfilling.” Many students travel while in India, giving them a view of the country and its long history, he said. Nasscom is now trying to track the ever-increasing numbers of foreign interns. Many are in India to study globalization firsthand, Mr. Karnik said; that is often not possible in China because, unlike India, English is not widely spoken there. Mr. Karnik said he had met more than a dozen interns from the Harvard Business School who were spending this summer in India. “I expect a bigger horde of students to arrive next year because the ones here said they had a great time and will go home to talk about it,” he said.
One intern, Mr. Anders, is getting a close view of social changes that are happening in India. Outsourcing has created thousands of better-paying jobs and spawned communities of young people who can afford cars, apartments and iPods. “I thought the stipend was the down side,” said Mr. Anders, “but coming here is a priceless experience.”