Group project in New York

An important part of our summer internship program at Citi is this two-week group project in New York. All associates working for different business functions in commercial banking are pre-assigned to groups of 6 to 8 people to solve a real business case, come up with recommendations and present them to senior leaders at the end. It’s essentially a five-day internal consulting project designed to evaluate our performance in leadership, business acumen and teamwork spirits. It was an intense and highly pressured project, which covers five markets in three different continents, serving over 10 million potential customers.

After this group project, my internship has only two weeks left. Apart from saying time flies, all of the interns that I met in New York, including myself are anxiously waiting to see if we will get return offers with Citibank. Therefore, every team member is working really hard together, trying to come up with some brilliant business ideas that can solve the real business cases for the bank. In earlier this week, summer interns from all business functions and all study programs were gathered at the Bank’s New York headquarter for the speech delivered by Vikrum Pandit, the CEO of Citigroup. In his speech, Mr Pandit talked about the importance of integrity in the world of finance and Citi’s transition to more transparent and responsible lending since he took the helm during the global financial crisis. The conference room was filled with over 600 summer interns, both undergraduate and graduate students from all the top business schools around the country. It was a great event in the summer.

Besides work, New York is always a great place to be in terms of social life and nice food. Talking about food, I arrived just in time for the New York restaurant week, which lasts for three weeks with about 100 participating restaurants. I went out several times with my fellow summer classmate to some nice restaurants in New York and had some really good time there. Lastly, I just hope that our team presentation in front of some very senior people in Citi goes well next week. Fingers crossed.