Experience + education + internship = long-term career prospects

Eshwari Murumkar started with experience, added some education and, as a result, further expanded her experience — and her horizons.

All those things equal not only a more impressive resume but also a bright future.

Murumkar, who’s from Pune, in western India, is a student in Royal Roads University’s Master of Global Management (MGM) program. She spent the first year of her studies back home and, since arriving in Canada in September 2021, has spent the second portion working remotely from Burnaby, BC for a Toronto-based home rental startup called Rhenti.

How she got to where she is took some global management on her part.

Murumkar graduated from Pune’s Sinhgad Institutes more than a decade ago with a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology. Since then, she has worked in IT, specifically in quality assurance (QA).

That means she oversaw the monitoring and evaluation of projects for customers in the banking and logistics sectors to ensure their products were bug-free at every stage of development — especially at the final, consumer stage.

It was that experience and her RRU education that landed her the internship at Rhenti, she says, noting that she started applying to Canadian companies months before she landed here.

And it has helped her as she worked with Rhenti colleagues building a platform for renters and landlords in Toronto that will expand to other Canadian cities. Rhenti aims to help landlords reach more prospective tenants and provides them with digital leasing tools; for renters, it provides detailed property profiles, validated listings and automated digital processing.

Murumkar’s role requires her to work with a team of 25 people and look at quality assurance through a global lens, something she felt prepared for due to her MGM studies.

As part of her coursework, she’d already learned more about Canadian culture, too, something that was reinforced during her time with Rhenti. In her experience working in IT in India, she says, there was a more hierarchical reporting structure and the duties a worker would take on would depend on their position. Here, Murumkar says employees even at junior levels work more independently and are given a great deal of responsibility.

Despite the differences, “This internship is a stepping stone into the Canadian job market,” she says, noting she’s hoping to stay in Canada and expand her work horizons to include product management in addition to QA. “You’re getting a whole bunch of experience in six months. It really adds a good level of confidence to future employers that I’m going to work with.”