The Indian Institute of Gems & Jewellery (IIGJ) is an initiative of the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), operating under India's Ministry of Commerce. With five campuses (Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, Udupi) and a sprawling academic-meets-industry mandate, the CEO's Office needed someone who could move fast across operational, strategic, and analytical work.
I came in on a two-month assignment as a project management intern reporting into leadership.
The role was deliberately broad. Three workstreams ended up dominating my time:
- Admissions strategy across 5 campuses. Standardized funnel processes, built SOPs, and surfaced conversion bottlenecks campus-by-campus.
- Operational frameworks. Designed classroom-level SOPs and execution frameworks that reduced inconsistency between campuses.
- Institutional advisory. Drafted a live MoU with IIM Madras and pitched a joint certification programme to IIFT, coordinating end-to-end across senior government and academic leadership — plus AI-integrated curriculum design, benchmarking global programmes into structured recommendations.
- Admissions outreach and conversion strategy rolled out across all 5 campuses
- SOPs and classroom frameworks adopted to improve execution consistency
- 40+ deliverables executed under tight timelines with minimal revisions — strategic briefs, process playbooks, and institutional frameworks
- Drafted a live institutional MoU with IIM Madras and pitched a joint certification programme to IIFT, adopted into leadership's institutional roadmap
Working inside a government-adjacent organization is a different rhythm. Decisions move when the right person is in the room, not when the deck is finished. I learned to write less for documents and more for the five-minute conversation those documents had to support.
The other learning: process is product in operations work. A well-designed SOP is worth more than a clever strategy memo, because the SOP gets used 50 times and the memo gets used once.