How to tell a real internship from a certificate mill

Thousands of "internships" are advertised to Indian students every month, and a large number of them are selling one thing: a PDF with your name on it. They are not illegal. They are simply not worth what they cost, and some of them cost quite a lot.

Here are seven checks. None of them requires you to know anything technical, and all seven together take about ten minutes. We have applied each one to ourselves, including the two where we do not come out of it perfectly, because a checklist its author passes seven times out of seven is an advertisement.

1. Ask what you will actually do each week

A real programme can tell you, before you pay, what happens in week three. A certificate mill cannot, because nothing happens in week three.

Look for specifics: a schedule with dates, a named deliverable, a stated number of hours. Be suspicious of "flexible, learn at your own pace" when it is the only thing on offer — self-paced is a legitimate format, but it is also what you say when there is nothing to schedule.

Us: eight weeks, one live session every Sunday at 11:30 am IST, one piece of work due the Saturday before the next session at 9:00 pm IST. The week-by-week outline is published on each track page before you apply.

2. Find out who marks your work — and whether anyone does

This is the single most useful question, because it is the most expensive thing to fake. Marking work takes a human being roughly twenty minutes per submission. A programme charging a small fee to a thousand people cannot be paying for that, so it does not happen.

Ask directly: who reads what I submit, and what do I get back? If the answer is a score, a badge, or silence, you are buying a certificate.

Us: every submission comes back with written feedback from a reviewer before the following Sunday. This is also the reason our cohorts are small, which is a limitation and not a feature.

3. Check whether the certificate can be verified by a stranger

A certificate is only worth what somebody checking it can confirm. A JPEG with a signature image on it can be made by anyone in ten minutes, and the people who matter — an employer, an admissions officer — know this.

What you want is a public verification page: a code on the certificate that anyone can type into the issuer's website to see who holds it, which programme, and whether it is still valid. No login, no account, no email to the issuer.

Us: every certificate carries a code that resolves at our verification page. You can see exactly what a stranger sees before you ever apply — it is a public page.

4. Read what the certificate actually claims

This is where most of the damage is done, and it is done to the student rather than by them.

A completion certificate says you completed a programme. That is a true and useful thing. The trouble starts when a certificate, or the marketing around it, implies employment, an internship at a company that was never involved, or a qualification it has no standing to award. Putting that on a CV exposes you when somebody checks.

Us: our certificate says it records completion of a supervised programme. It does not say you were employed, and it is not an academic or government qualification. We say that in the certificate email as well, because the moment somebody is pleased with it is exactly the moment to be clear about what it is.

5. Look for a promise nobody can keep

"Guaranteed placement." "100% job assistance." "Get hired by top companies."

No training programme can guarantee employment, because the decision belongs to an employer who has made no promise to anybody. A guarantee you cannot enforce is not a guarantee; it is a sentence. And "assistance" is doing a very great deal of work in that second phrase.

A related tell: a number with no denominator. "500+ students placed" means nothing without "out of how many".

Us: we make no placement claim of any kind, and we would rather you held that against us than discovered it later.

6. Work out what it costs, in total

Ask for the full figure in writing before you pay anything. The pattern to watch for is a small entry fee followed by a larger one — a "registration" charge, then a "certification" charge at the end, then a "verification" charge if you want the thing to be checkable.

A genuine red line: any programme that asks for money after selecting you, framed as a deposit or a seat-booking fee, with pressure to pay within hours.

Us: ₹250 for the whole eight weeks, requested only if you are selected, with nothing further to pay at any point. If ₹250 is genuinely the obstacle, we hold waived places in every cohort and a waived place is identical in every respect.

7. Check what happens to your data

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, an organisation must tell you what it collects and why, and it must obtain verifiable consent from a parent or guardian before processing the data of anyone under 18. It may not run behavioural advertising at children.

So: is there a privacy policy, does it name specific fields rather than "certain information", and — if the student is a minor — does the sign-up process actually stop and ask a parent?

Us: a student under 18 cannot complete enrolment until a parent or guardian has opened a link, read a plain-language summary of what we collect and why, and agreed. Nothing starts before that. We run no advertising, no behavioural tracking and no profiling, and we do not sell data.

The two checks we would not pass perfectly

Track record. We are a young organisation. If your test is "show me five years of alumni", we cannot meet it, and a programme that could would be a more conservative choice. What we offer instead is that everything we do claim is checkable today: the curriculum, the fee, the refund terms, the certificate specimen, the verification page.

Scale. We take a fixed number of people per track because feedback is written by humans. If you are turned down, that is usually what happened, and it is a real limitation of the model rather than a selection signal about you.

If something is wrong

If anybody contacts you in our name asking for a payment to a personal account, an OTP, a password, or a card number, it is not us. We never ask for any of those. Forward it to us and we will say so in writing.

Finally: being asked to pay is not itself a warning sign, and free is not itself a reassurance. The free programmes in this category are usually free because your attention, or your data, is the product. What matters is whether you can tell exactly what you get, and whether anyone can check it afterwards.