Let's put things into context - what exactly did I do the last couple of weeks? As I mentioned in my last post, I am working for a client in NJ and we are helping to design their organization structure (strategic objective, reporting structure, incentives, metrics, etc.) for the COO. So yes, this is one of those high touch engagements, and as a result, the attire is business formal. The first week was all about ramping up and setting the expectations for the rest of the summer. Booz & Co. gives its interns the undiluted consulting experience - this means that we are expected to contribute just like we were full-time Associates. So as you can imagine, the learning curve is extremely steep. I had a lot of reading up to do to develop an understanding of the industry. After I spent a day doing that, it was time to understand the client firm (one day). After that I had to get going, and any other background learning would have to come from the job itself. Given that 9 weeks is an extremely short period of time, I wanted to become productive as soon as I could and made a conscious effort those first few days to ramp up my knowledge. Once my manager noticed that I was relatively comfortable with the knowledge (at least I knew where to look for what!), I took over the workstream of developing the model of the current view of the organization. The team had already collected data from various client units. I had to collate the data, clean it up and integrate it into the model in a meaningful way.
We had a big client presentation scheduled the following week, and my manager said that my model would be driving a few slides on the deck. So I had to put in a lot of effort (yes, I even worked a couple of hours over the weekend) to build the pages. My biggest takeaway here is that great excel modeling skills is not just about being able to model close to real life scenarios while making good assumptions. It also involves being able to automate a lot of the repetitive tasks so that you can spend more time thinking about how best you can do the former. As my manager had mentioned, my pages did end up going into the deck. It was a pretty good feeling to see that my analysis was directly impacting the client. The presentation went well, and now my task is to extend this model so that we can use this to design the new organization.
The biggest surprise for me has been the people. There's no question that they are all extremely smart folks. But the best part is, despite how busy they were (there was quite a bit of pressure within the team before that first deliverable) they always took the time out to help me with my questions, and made sure I was comfortable. To summarize, the first two weeks on the project have been fantastic, and I am really enjoying myself so far. Stay tuned!
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