Sunday, August 7, 2011

Death Valley

I have been through 8 weeks out of my 10-week internship. Although I had a very easy and smooth start, it is getting crazily busy as my internship approaches its end.

As I mentioned in earlier post, I have not been assigned to a real client project for the summer, but instead, I have worked on two Bid and Proposal projects. While the first one lasted only a week which is norm for B&P effort, the second one that I am working on has been going on for more than a month and there is almost another month schedule ahead of it.

To give you a sense of what I have been up to, I just sent out version 55 of the project deck to my boss. So, basically I have been intimate friends with PPT and Excel. Unlike normal projects, I have to deliver some new slides or spreadsheet models on a daily basis. I spent 10 to 16 hours every day in office, worked more hours after coming back home, and sometimes need to get up 4am to catch the 6am flight to New York, and flew back to Chicago the next evening. So, are you still thinking about consulting??
However, on the bright side, due to the importance of this proposal, I have been given great exposure to high level leadership team during the project. I spent 6 hours this Wednesday with IBM Global XX industry Leader, North America YY practice leader, and other VPs and executives in a tiny meeting room in IBM New York office. Can you believe it?

Although tired, I have been learning and improving a lot during the past weeks! Not only excel and PPT skills, but also the way I think and work. I leant to pay attention to details such as font size of a text box, meanwhile I think strategically from higher level and different perspectives. I become more comfortable with uncertainties and vagueness and am able to make educated assumptions wherever necessary. I realized that we are actually employed and paid to solve those uncertainties which clients found difficult to solve themselves. I am happy with my progress!!

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