Preparations

(MBA,Booz) I believe that one of the questions that bother many of us is how to better prepare for the summer. As most of us, including me, are opting at a full time offer from the company we intern with, we all want to be as ready as possible to get the job done in the most impressive way.

Having that in mind, I spent some time throughout the past two months consulting with MBA2's and friends who work in consulting and tried to gain a better understanding of the challenges I will encounter as a consultant and more important - the things I can learn now that will improve my ability to well perform as a consultant.

As in many cases in life I have some good news and some bad news, the good news is that there is one important tool that all consultants must master which is Excel! The bad news are that there is not much you can do except for making sure you are good enough in Excel.

For those who wanted to spend some time learning SQL - all of the people I spoke to told me not to waste my time, and that in case it is needed there are specialists that do that. If you thought it's time to improve your calculator skills and learn to use these 30 buttons you never used by today - rethink it, Excel got you covered! In fact, any route I took to better prepare lead to Excel.

So although I do not want to sound like a Microsoft ad, the most important thing for you to do before you start your internship in consulting is to learn Excel, if you already speak it fluently – lucky you! Otherwise – BIT512 will be very helpful in learning the basics and experiencing some of the powerful tools Excel can offer you, if you feel brave you can jump into the deeper water of BIT513, it is a more focused class that takes a deep-dive into risk analysis and decision making, I found that class less helpful than BIT512 yet it still was an interesting class.

Well, that will be all for today, the next post will be written after the first week of my internship!