How My Summer Internship almost got me in Jail (not POSH)

I'm from Tier 1.5 NIT and in my 6th Semester I've managed to get an on campus Internship at a Fintech Company

(It's a Loan app btw)

It was a 2 month internship..

I was assigned with the creation of the Call centre automation platform via Voice AI..

(In other words simply making things easier for Non Technical Operators )

Everything was going well....till the first project review...came up..

I was the first in line to present..

the CTO criticised me over Agent voice Quality... apparently he said it was too 'bot'ish..That didn't do anything to me...

but later on he continued to Praise all the other projects ...As if he was Head over Heels for them...

But none of those projects weren't really that impactful..at that point of time

And After that I took it very seriously...and worked on voice Quality...The main issue was Latency in response of the AI Agent...

I 've reduced it..yet the CTO wasn't really satisfied when I personally showed it to him ...( I managed to get the latency down from 4 sec to 300-500ms..btw)

And From that day I've lost all my interest..in the internship... I thought I could somehow crack another on campus placement...offer that's better than this one..(First Mistake)

internship went pretty okayish...

Now comes the Brutal Mistake that almost got me in Jail..(a bit technical)

On the very first day our mentor stated that we could put any of the projects that we're working on...in this internship..In our resume

So on the last day..I've decided to put my project and..one of my co-intern's projects..in my resume (I've helped her btw)...

For any project in your resume you need to put GitHub links.. along with it.

(Atleast That's what I thought)

So I was first trying to push my co-intern's project..

Since all of our projects were in a single AWS EC2 instance (Virtual Machine)..

I took her permission...She agreed and SSHed in the EC2 instance...

after that...I copied her Repo from EC2 instance to my desktop....

And then I did

git setorigin 'my-github-repo-link'

And then I did

Git push

I was prompted with the AWS key being in .env.example file

But...I dismissed it..as a false positive... because I assumed why'd someone put the AWS key in the example file ...

And successfully pushed it to GitHub

And then I made it private

And was in the lunch party given by our mentor as it was the last day...

We were laughing and chilling..some random dude at the restaurant proposed to one of my Co-interns ryt there

All of the sudden My mentor gets the call , He lifts it.., His Smile vanished... He looks at me and Yells " Kyu GitHub pe push Kiya tune?"

Till that point I literally didn't know that it was wrong....

so I immediately deleted the GitHub repo on my account...via mobile..

We got back to the office

Then our senior cloud architect called me to the Cabin.. yelled at me for leaking the AWS key and pushing the Repo into personal GitHub...

Firstly I don't know that...pushing the Repo to personal GitHub is wrong..and coming to the AWS Key

...i said it's a false positive..as it's in the .env.example file..why would anyone put the key in the example file...

Then he clearly showed me the mail from AWS showing the exact commit..

Luckily we had Network Groups in AWS (that means even if you have the key you can't use it unless you're in the office network)...

so no financial loss occurred....And Cloud Engineers saved the day..

Now that Legendary Co -Intern Mahadevi🙏🏻comes to me and says...that

She didn't know how .env is created in AWS Ec2 instance so she decided to put the AWS key in .env.example😭😭 ...

genuinely wtf.. (literally a simple nano command)

Guess what ...she got the PPO and I didn't (Obv)

After completing the internship I got to know about intellectual property rights....

The company could legally take action against me if any loss occurred cuz of my action....this actually scared me...I was so close to ending my career before it even began...I was so lucky that no loss actually happened..

So I've