AICTE’s internship policy counts a B.Tech internship at a minimum of 630 hours (14 credits at 45 hours a credit) and says the training is evaluated in three stages: by the industry, by your faculty mentor, and through a seminar or viva at your institute that is based on your training report (AICTE Internship Policy, as hosted by SRES Pune). So the report is not paperwork after the real work. It is the thing your college actually reads, and with a little planning it can also be the thing a founder reads.

Key takeaways

  • The policy asks for a daily diary, a report signed by your internship supervisor, an attendance record and an evaluation sheet signed and stamped by the industry.
  • The industry supervisor grades the report on five stated criteria, and your institute then tests it in a seminar or viva.
  • The diary is the raw material. Keep it from day one and the report is mostly assembly.
  • Write one version for the examiner and link the evidence, so the same document can be shown to an employer.

What your college is actually asking for

The policy is more specific than most students expect. After the internship, the student “should prepare a comprehensive report to indicate what he has observed and learnt in the training period”, and the report “should be signed by the Internship Supervisor.” The industry supervisor then grades it on five criteria: originality; adequacy and purposeful write-up; organisation, format, style and language; variety and relevance of learning experience; and practical applications, with “relationships with basic theory and concepts taught in the course” (AICTE policy, chapter 4).

Two things follow. First, “originality” is the first criterion, which is bad news for the downloadable sample reports that most students start from. Second, the last criterion asks you to connect the work to something you studied, which is a step students skip because it does not feel like part of the internship.

AICTE sets the floor. Your university may add its own cover page, declaration and chapter list, and its template wins wherever the two differ. Ask your faculty mentor for it before you write a word.

The diary is not optional, and it writes half your report

The policy requires a daily diary and says it may be demanded “at any point of time”; failing to produce it, “Intern may be debarred for the remaining period of his/her internship.” It also notes that the diary “will also help to a great extent in writing the industrial report since much of the information has already been incorporated” (AICTE policy, sections 4.1–4.2).

For a software internship the diary does not need sketches. Five lines a day is enough: what you were asked to do, what you did, a link to the commit or pull request, what blocked you, what you learnt. Those five lines are exactly the evidence the report needs, and they are much harder to reconstruct from memory three months later.

internship-report-daily-log

Chapter plan for a software internship

This is a structure, not an AICTE requirement. It maps the five grading criteria onto chapters, and it works for an in-person or a remote internship alike. Aim for something a supervisor can sign without rereading.

  1. Front matter your university asks for. Cover page, the supervisor’s certificate, declaration, acknowledgement, contents. Copy your college’s template exactly.
  2. The organisation and the team, in one page. What the company does, who you reported to, the tools, and how you worked day to day, including time zones if it was remote.
  3. The problem you were given. One paragraph on the task and why it mattered to the team, in your own words.
  4. What you built, and the decisions inside it. The design, the alternatives you rejected and why, the code that was hard. This is where “originality” is earned.
  5. Evidence. Links to merged pull requests, a deployed demo, test results, a short walkthrough video. Claims without a link read as decoration.
  6. Theory meets practice. Name two or three courses (operating systems, DBMS, computer networks) and show where they decided something in your work. This is the fifth criterion.
  7. What went wrong and what you would change. A short, honest page is the strongest signal of real work in the whole document.
  8. Appendix. Weekly log extracts, attendance record, and the supervisor-signed evaluation sheet.

The seminar is the real exam

After submission you present before an expert committee, and the policy says the evaluation covers “quality of content presented”, “proper planning for presentation”, “effectiveness of presentation” and “depth of knowledge and skills”, with the diary and attendance analysed alongside the report. A committee can ask about any sentence you wrote, so write nothing you could not defend.

Sort the signatures in week one

The policy says the diary and report go to the faculty mentor “along with attendance record and an evaluation sheet duly signed and stamped by the industry.” A remote startup in another country probably has no rubber stamp, and may never have been asked to fill a college evaluation sheet. That is easy to fix at the start and awkward to fix at the end. In your first week, send your supervisor the college’s evaluation form, ask your faculty mentor what the college will accept in place of a stamp, and keep the answer in writing.

Also know the attendance rules. The policy allows one day of leave in four weeks and two days in six weeks, and asks you to email both the faculty mentor and the industry supervisor at least a day before taking leave.

Make the report work twice

Your examiner reads the report once. A founder deciding whether to take a chance on you will read a link in ninety seconds. If chapter 4 and chapter 5 point at real commits and a working demo, the same work serves both readers. Turn those two chapters into a public README, and consider recording a walkthrough of the build; our resume guide covers how to route an employer to it. Tierones profiles are built on this idea: your projects, your links and your walkthrough, rather than an adjective list. Students writing up an internship done on an off-campus, remote basis may also want our explainer on how off-campus internships work.

FAQ

What should an internship report contain?

AICTE’s policy gives no fixed template. It says the report should show what you observed and learnt, and lists five things the industry supervisor grades: originality, an adequate and purposeful write-up, organisation and format, variety and relevance of learning, and practical application of course theory. Your university’s template, if it has one, takes priority.

Who has to sign the internship report?

Under the AICTE policy the report should be signed by the internship supervisor, and the diary and report go to your faculty mentor with an attendance record and an evaluation sheet signed and stamped by the industry. Ask in week one: a remote startup may have no stamp, and you will want to agree an alternative with your college early.

Can I use the same report for a remote internship at a US startup?

Yes. The policy allows internships to be part-time during the semester and full-time in vacations and does not require a physical site. Your report must still be signed by your supervisor and meet your college’s format, so settle how the signature and evaluation sheet will be handled before you start.

Doing your internship remotely? Create your profile with your .ac.in email and your GitHub, and keep your report’s best chapters as links a founder can open.