She Decided at the age of eleven. She got an internship at Twenty-Two. Here Is Everything That Happened Between.

2026 · Parul Institute of Design, Parul University, Vadodara, Gujarat | Pine Studio, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

Nandini Agrawal was eleven years old when she decided she wanted to be a designer.

She was from Narmadapuram, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, and she had no particular framework for what that decision meant professionally. No family member in the field. No design school she knew of. Just a certainty, unusually early and unusually clear, that this was the direction.

Eleven years later, she was sitting in the offices of Pine Studio in Ahmedabad, producing 2D working drawings for live client projects alongside senior designers, learning in a week what a semester of coursework could only begin to introduce.

The journey between those two moments is the story worth telling. Because it was not linear, not always confident, and not achieved without the right people in the right places. But it was, in the end, entirely navigable, by a student from a small town in Madhya Pradesh who applied to enough firms, chose the right one, and showed up ready to work.

What Parul Did and Did Not Do

Nandini is honest about her undergraduate years. She describes herself as an average student, doing two to three hours of work on assignments each day, not the student who stayed up late every night or filled every free hour with extra projects. She does not pretend otherwise. Looking back, she misses the time.

What the four-year programme at the Parul Institute of Design gave her was something more durable than a grade point average. It gave her a working foundation.

By the time she finished, she could think systematically about how spaces would be inhabited, how function translates into form, and how aesthetic decisions emerge from problem-solving rather than preceding it. She could draft in AutoCAD and model in SketchUp at a level of proficiency that went beyond introductory familiarity. She understood technical detailing: the principles of usable space, circulation, and proportion and the considerations that make a room work for the people inside it, not just the people photographing it.

None of this arrived fully formed. Ms. Rutu Bhatt, her primary faculty mentor across the programme, was the person who kept the formation going when it stalled. Nandini describes her as one of the kindest and most helpful people she encountered at the institute, available when she was confused, motivating when energy ran low, patient with the questions that felt too basic to ask anyone else. Design education produces self-doubt in most students. What faculty like Ms. Bhatt do is ensure that self-doubt does not become the reason someone stops.

The Thesis That Taught Her What She Needed

The final-year thesis project at PID requires students to take a complete design problem and see it through from brief to resolution.

Nandini chose to convert an office building into a Meditation Centre.

The choice was deliberate. It was not the easiest brief she could have written for herself. Transforming a space designed for commercial productivity into one designed for stillness and inward attention required her to think about the same physical envelope in a completely different way. How does circulation change when people are moving toward quiet rather than toward meetings? How does lighting shift? What happens to materiality, acoustic quality, the visual atmosphere of corridors and rooms when the activity they are meant to support is the opposite of what they were built for?

She had to answer all of those questions in one project, across one academic year, applying everything she had been building since first year. The thesis did not just test what she knew. It showed her how the pieces connected: conceptual development, space planning, technical detailing, and material thinking, all of it inside a single problem structure.

When she arrived at Pine Studio, she recognised that structure. It was the same one the senior designers were using.

The Internship Hunt That Almost Did Not Happen

When Nandini’s semester required an internship, the honest feeling was something close to dread.

Working in a real design firm, away from the studio environment she had lived in for four years, evaluated not by faculty who knew her development arc but by professionals who had no reason to be patient with gaps, looked different from the outside than it had from inside the coursework.

She did not let the feeling stop her. She opened LinkedIn.

The strategy she used was not complicated, but it was deliberate. She searched for design firms across multiple cities, looked at their recent work, and applied broadly — to enough firms that any single rejection would not close the path. She received an offer from a Vadodara-based startup relatively quickly. She turned it down.

Her reasoning was specific, not snobbish. Startups carry a kind of operational unpredictability that established firms do not. At a startup, the learning environment is shaped partly by the work and partly by the instability of the firm itself. At an established firm with a recognisable name and a track record of completed projects, the internship structure is more likely to be real: senior designers who know how to work with juniors, projects that have clear briefs, feedback loops that are built into how the studio operates.

She wanted to learn as much as possible in three months. She chose Pine Studio.

Her portfolio and resume, assembled from coursework, project documentation, and the thesis that was shaped with help from faculty. The interview was a single conversation, covering the basics of interior design, her existing work, and why Pine Studio. The firm said yes.

Inside Pine Studio

Three months at Pine Studio gave Nandini something the four years before it could not.

Her primary responsibilities were creating project visualisations and producing detailed 2D drawings for active client projects. Both tasks required the full capability stack, AutoCAD and SketchUp fluency, technical detailing precision, and the ability to translate a senior designer’s intent into a drawing that a contractor could work from. She had the foundations. The internship was where those foundations became automatic.

She has been direct about what changed. Academic software training is necessarily partial; there are only so many projects in a curriculum, only so many hours in a semester. The first time you use AutoCAD every day for three months on real work, with a deadline and a client at the end of it, the gap between knowing the software and being fluent in it closes fast. The same with SketchUp. The same with graphic design, where she arrived at Pine Studio identifying a relative weakness and left with senior designer guidance having narrowed it significantly.

But the thing that surprised her most was the client work.

She spoke directly with Pine Studio’s clients during her internship. She listened to what they wanted, watched how senior designers translated ambiguous preferences into concrete design decisions, and began to develop her own version of that translation skill. She found that listening, actually listening and not just waiting for the brief to finish, was a professional capability she had not fully understood before. It is the thing that determines whether a client trusts you with their space. It is also the thing that determines whether the project delivered is the project the client wanted.

Time management arrived the same way. She is honest: she wishes she had built it during her academic years rather than discovering its weight during the internship. The rhythm of a professional studio, deadlines that do not negotiate, and principals who expect tasks to be completed when they are due are different from the rhythm of a student programme. She adapted. But she knows she would have contributed faster if she had arrived adapted already.

What She Would Tell the Student Who Is Scared

Looking back across both the programme and the internship, Nandini’s advice for design students facing the same transition is not inspirational. It is operational.

Build your software before you apply. AutoCAD and SketchUp proficiency are what make the first weeks of an internship productive rather than spent catching up. Students who arrive fluent can contribute. Students who arrive still learning the commands spend their best learning time on setup rather than substance.

Treat listening as a skill to train. Senior designers will give direction that needs to be heard precisely, not approximately. Clients will tell you what they want in language that has to be decoded, not transcribed. Listening carefully, without defensiveness, without the urge to respond before the other person has finished, is a professional discipline. It can be practised.

Manage your time before someone else has to manage it for you. The internship will surface this immediately. Better to build the discipline during academic years when the consequences of failure are grades rather than client relationships.

Understand that this work is people-work. Interior design is not only about spaces. It is about clients who have budgets and fears and tastes that do not always match each other. It is about contractors who need to be coordinated. It is about senior designers who need to trust you before they give you the work that teaches you the most. Students who arrive at internships thinking the work is creative miss half the discipline. The other half is relational.

The Broader Pattern: Two Students, Two Paths, Same Destination

Nandini is not the only Parul Institute of Design student whose internship story is worth examining.

Jhanvi Jhagada, another recent PID graduate, secured a three-month paid internship at Studio 603 Ahmedabad through a different route entirely: direct portfolio outreach, a single email with her portfolio attached, a callback the next day, and a telephonic interview that confirmed her selection. No LinkedIn application volume. Just one firm, chosen specifically, approached directly.

Both students reached the same destination by different roads. The difference in method is less important than what remained constant: a portfolio that showed real work, a technical foundation that held up when the firm tested it, and the willingness to reach out to firms and absorb the rejections that came before the acceptance.

The Training and Placement Cell at Parul University supports both approaches – coordinating formal firm relationships for students who want structured placement infrastructure, providing resume and portfolio guidance for students building their own applications, and offering the ongoing mentorship that turns an internship experience into a career foundation rather than a three-month credential.

Where Nandini Is Now

Nandini Agrawal has completed her degree from the Parul Institute of Design. She is not going to immediately apply for a master’s programme; her experience at Pine Studio confirmed that professional practice, at this stage, is where her learning accelerates fastest.

She is applying for full-time design roles, still supported by the placement network at Parul University, still working through the guidance of faculty who helped her navigate the internship search in the first place.

She is twenty-two. She decided at eleven. Everything in between was the preparation.

The next chapter is the work itself.

So come, join the community of designers at Parul Institute of Design. Explore the structured internship pathways, faculty mentorship, and programmes that take design students from coursework to careers.