There's a specific kind of anxiety that comes with internship season. Not the loud, dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that sits in your chest at 2am while you're refreshing your inbox for the fourteenth time, wondering if the silence means what you think it means.
This is that story.
How It Started — For The Stipend, If I'm Being Honest
I applied to Saanjh.ai the way I've applied to most things this semester. Quickly. Without much thought. The listing showed up, I read it for thirty seconds, thought "it's about time I start getting internships if I want to be where I want to be," and hit apply.
That was it. No research. No preparation. No real expectation.
I'd been rejected from several internships before this. Enough that rejection had started to feel like background noise — it stung, but not as badly as it used to. You build a kind of callus after a while. So filling out one more form felt like no big deal. No harm in applying. Worst case, nothing changes.
I forgot about it almost immediately.
The First Shortlist — And The Form I Filled Without Thinking
Then the first shortlist mail came. Suddenly it was real.
I filled out the next form, still not taking it too seriously. There was a checkbox somewhere in my brain that said okay, done, moving on. And then I did exactly that. Moved on. Forgot about it. Life continued — classes, OFA updates, the usual chaos of a semester at IIT.
Days passed. Several of them. No mail. No update. Nothing.
Honestly? I forgot I had even applied. Not in a dramatic way. Just in the way you forget about most things you don't expect to actually happen. It had quietly slipped out of my mind entirely.
And then the mail arrived. Round 1 — a conversation with the founder himself.
Round 1 — And The Creeping Dread
The first round was a conversation with the founder. It went fine. More than fine. But the moment it ended and they said "we'll be sending shortlist mails for the technical round" — something shifted.
Because now there was a next round. A technical round. And technical meant they were going to ask me things. Specific things. Things I might not know.
What if they find out I don't actually know anything?
I have a campus app. OFA. Built it solo. It serves over 1,100 registered students at IIT Jodhpur with around 500 using it daily. It's in the process of becoming the official IIT Jodhpur app.
And yet.
The voice in my head wasn't saying any of that. It was saying: you're going to walk into that interview and they're going to ask you something and you're going to go blank and they're going to know. They're going to know you're not as good as your resume makes you look. You don't know the stuff they're going to ask. You're going to tank it.
So when the days after round 1 passed with no technical round mail — I felt something I didn't expect.
Relief.
Genuine, exhale-slowly relief. I didn't make it to the technical round. That's okay. At least I don't have to face whatever they were going to ask me. The fear of being found out was heavier than the disappointment of not moving forward. I had already started making peace with it.
And then the technical round mail arrived.
That's imposter syndrome. Not the motivational poster version. The real version. Where evidence doesn't help because the anxiety isn't responding to evidence — it's responding to fear. Where you feel relieved at rejection because at least rejection is familiar.
The Part Where I Didn't Read The Email Properly
The technical round invitation arrived. I read it fast — too fast — and somehow convinced myself the interview was the same day.
I panicked.
I studied like I had never studied before. Causal modelling. Dataset structuring. Distributed systems architecture. Event driven systems. Things I had never touched. I went from zero to attempting to understand Bayesian networks in a few hours. I even had a lab that afternoon — misread it as 3-5pm when it was actually 2-4pm — and emailed the interviewer explaining I might be a few minutes late due to my lab.
The interviewer called me.
To tell me the interview was in two days.
I had not read the subject line of the email. It was right there. The date. I had just... not read it.
I felt embarrassed and relieved at the same time in a ratio I still can't calculate. The impending doom had been delayed. I had two extra days. I used them.
The Technical Round — Doing More Than I Expected
When the actual interview day arrived I was nervous in the way you're nervous before an exam you've studied hard for. Not paralyzed. Activated.
And something strange happened — I answered everything. Not perfectly. But genuinely. They asked about my architecture choices in OFA. About security decisions. About real problems I'd faced with real users. About the polling system I'd built alone. And I found that I had real answers because I had done real things.
The 1,100 users weren't a number on a resume in that moment. They were a story I could tell with specifics.
I got shortlisted for round three.
Chai Pe Charcha — Five People, One Co-Founder, A Time Crunch
Round three was a group conversation with a co-founder. Five candidates. They wanted to select two or three.
I had done my research. Properly this time. I knew the science — the Algorithm of Suffering, the SBD axis, the animated series they'd built using Unreal Engine after two failed attempts with live film and 2D animation. I knew her journey from CA to filmmaker to co-founder. I'd found a podcast where she'd mentioned she couldn't sleep over the scripts that kept coming to her — that the films had arrived without invitation.
The conversation went well in the parts where it went. I had a genuine one-on-one exchange with the co-founder early on.
But there were five of us and not enough time and I went quiet in the second half. There was a moment near the end where I had a question I wanted to ask and I hesitated and the moment passed. I still think about that hesitation. Not with agony — just with the quiet note of next time, don't wait.
They said results by 9pm.
The moment that session ended, all the energy drained out of me. Just like that. Whatever confidence had carried me through the technical round, whatever excitement I'd felt going in — it was gone. Replaced by a flat, heavy certainty.
I wasn't getting it.
Five people. Two or three spots. And I'd gone quiet in the second half. I'd hesitated on that question and let the moment pass. I replayed it over and over. Why didn't I just ask? Why did I go silent? The co-founder had spent real time with me early in the session but that felt distant now, irrelevant. I had convinced myself that whatever goodwill I'd built had been cancelled out by the silence.
I was disappointed. Not dramatically. Just quietly, deeply disappointed in the way that settles into your bones when you wanted something more than you'd admitted to yourself.
The Waiting — The Part Nobody Talks About
9pm came. No mail.
I told myself: okay. They said 9pm. Give it time. But I was already checking every two to three minutes. I know how that sounds. I did it anyway. Every refresh felt like bracing for impact. My heart was beating so hard I thought it might come out.
Nothing.
I went to sleep telling myself it was fine. That I had too much on my plate anyway. OFA. Coursework. It was fine.
9am the next morning. No mail.
This was the moment something inside me quietly settled. The story I was telling myself — maybe it's just delayed, maybe they're still deciding — started to feel like cope. I had been rejected. I just hadn't been told yet. That was the only explanation that made sense to me.
But I still couldn't bring myself to just move on. So I gathered whatever was left of my courage and messaged asking if the results were out yet.
They said by noon.
Okay. Noon. One more deadline to wait for. I held onto it.
Noon came and went. 1:04pm. No mail.
And that was it. That was the moment I stopped waiting. Not dramatically — no sudden anger, no grief. Just a quiet, exhausted acceptance. It's done. You didn't get it. Time to close this chapter.
I actually felt something close to sad peace. Like at least now I knew. At least the uncertainty was over. I started thinking about what comes next, other applications, other opportunities. I told myself I had gained a lot from the process anyway. That it was experience. That it was fine.
I opened WhatsApp.
I started typing a message. Something like — "Thanks for the opportunity, I really enjoyed learning about Saanjh and connecting with the team."
A gracious exit. A dignified goodbye. Sent before they could reject me so that the rejection would feel like my choice. So I could be the one who closed the door.
My thumb was over the send button.
The Message I Almost Sent
I didn't send it.
Not because I had a sudden moment of clarity. Not because someone stopped me. I was just... in the loop. Replaying outcomes. Hundreds of them. Every possible version of what had happened and what it meant and what would happen next. The loop kept going and going and I kept not sending and not sending and —
A mail arrived.
"We had intended to share the final round results by today. That is not happening. We are using the extra time to get things in order on our end — so that when you come on board, the context is ready and you can hit the ground running."
When you come on board.
I read it three times.
The message I had almost sent was still in my drafts. I deleted it.
What I Actually Learned
Results are still pending as I write this. So I can't tell you I got the internship. I can tell you I didn't not get it — which twenty minutes earlier I was completely certain I had.
Here's the thing about anxiety: it is not a reliable narrator.
It told me I was going to tank the interview. I didn't. It told me the rejection meant I wasn't good enough. The rejection hadn't come. It told me that silence meant failure. The silence meant a startup was running behind on admin.
Every single prediction was wrong. And I nearly acted on every single one of them.
The goodbye message would have been the most expensive thing I almost did. Not because it would have definitely cost me the opportunity — maybe they would have laughed it off, maybe they would have understood. But because I would have made a permanent decision based on temporary anxiety. I would have written my own rejection before anyone else could.
That's the thing about imposter syndrome that nobody really says clearly: it doesn't just make you feel bad. It makes you act. It makes you shrink before you're asked to. It makes you apologize for taking up space that was yours to begin with.
The only thing that stopped me was being stuck in an overthinking loop long enough for reality to arrive.
I'd like to say I stopped myself with wisdom and self-awareness. I didn't. I stopped myself by accident.
But I'll take it.
For Whoever Needs To Hear This
If you're in the waiting period right now — refreshing your inbox, reading silence as rejection, drafting your gracious goodbye — just wait one more hour.
Not because it'll definitely work out. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the silence really is the answer and the kindest thing is to move on.
But you don't know that yet. And you deserve to find out from them, not from yourself.
Don't be the one who rejects you.
Until the last mail has been sent, the last call has been made, the last decision has been communicated — you're still in it.
Stay in it.
Still waiting on the result. Will update when I know.
Built with anxiety, bad inbox habits, and one very lucky overthinking loop.
p.s i tend to use em dashes instinctively
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