Goodbye Dallas!

(MBA,Booz) Nine weeks had passed in the speed of light; it feels like only yesterday we went through training in New Jersy and now I’m already in the airport on my way back home to Ann Arbor.

The past few days were very exciting, my analytical model was put into use and its results will be utilized to let the customer take a very important decision. In parallel to that, I presented a deck to the Dallas office, summarizing my past nine weeks.

If I try to summarize these nine fast going weeks, I think that first of all it was a very good learning, I learned about the consultant way of life, the Booz culture and about myself. And most important of all I learned that I would really like to do this work as a full time. It is an ever changing work; new challenges arise every day and with every customer. This job takes you out of your comfort zone on a daily basis, some people might not like this idea but for me it’s a thrill! I believe this type of challenges keep you sharp and assure that boredom will not be part of the daily routine.

One of the fundamentals of being a consultant is working in a team, the experiences I had with my team were amazing, it was a group of talented people who played a major part in my final decision to pursue this career path. I found out that Booz consulting teams are very supportive and are also fun to go out with after the working hours.

My internship had taken me through all kind of experiences with my teammates and taught me some values!

I learned the value of friendship when I got stuck with one of my teammates on a shaky plane for two hours because the pilot didn’t succeed landing due to crazy weather, another teammate taught me courage when he managed to convince the whole team to eat at the 105 degrees, a vegan raw food restaurant; Artistic ability was presented by my managing partner as he prepared his famous smoked ribs in a BBQ; I learned common sense when one of my teammates convinced me to eliminate all the macros from my over engineered Excel model though another key learning was pride of ownership which made me keep some of them at the end of the day ;-)

So this is the end of my blog, it was a pleasure sharing my experiences with you and I hope that some of my writing gave you some insights about the consulting world.

Networking in a consulting world

(MBA,Booz) Socializing and networking is an important issue for every intern, though I guess it’s a bigger issue for a consulting intern. The way consulting teams are built for a specific project are network derived and one’s ability to connect to the right people might determine whether he\she will be stuffed to a wanted project.

There are few circles in which a consultant networks, it starts with the home office in which a consultant spends Fridays and his\her time “on the beach” – a term that is used to describe time with no project assignment. Then comes the practice – in Booz we are all aligned to a certain practice and are stuffed accordingly, so knowing a principal from one’s practice that is in charge of a wanted project might turn out very helpful even if that principal is from another office. And there’s always the regular firm wide networking with everyone else.

It’s a big challenge to understand the way the system works and who are the right people to address once you want to be stuffed on an assignment – but on the other hand, judging by whom I met so far, this company has great people and culture and networking in Booz is a pleasure rather than a “task to accomplish”. At the end of the day, unlike most other jobs, consultants are stuck together for better or worse along every Monday to Thursday, and if they don’t find their peers fun to be with after work - when having dinner or when stuck in an airport – it’s not good for the whole team.

And now for a little update from the field! All the hard work I did in the past few weeks will come to realization this week when the piece of work I am responsible for will be used to help the customer to make a very important decision, A very exciting time for me!

That will be all for today, next post will be my last one and will close this blog as my internship ends in two weeks.

Life from a consultant point of view

(MBA,Booz) Five weeks had passed by very fast and I am slowly getting used to the consultant tempo, it starts Monday morning with an early flight to the project location, then a taxi to the hotel, check in and straight to the team room where I literally spend most of my day. Each team has its own rules; in my case we have a daily team meeting 6:30 PM before we call it a day, though there is always something else to do, so most of the time we don’t leave before 7:30 PM. When we do call it a day, we go to the hotel, drop the computer bag and go out to grab dinner so it’s not until around 9-9:30 PM that I arrive to my room to take a shower , once a week we have a team dinner so we arrive to our room even later. The morning usually starts around 9 AM – but it depends on the customer – in our case this is an early one and so is our wakeup call – 7:30 we are already on site working. On Thursday the team returns home – or to be more precise – each team member flies to his home which might be anywhere in the US, so it’s a shorter day that might end as early as 4:30 though I usually fly out around 7:30, it gives more time to accomplish tasks and airport security lines are much shorter at that time.

Friday is a home office day – it is an easier day 9-5 basically and there’s always something fun happening in the office - for the past two weeks we had World Cup games screening accompanied with breakfast!

I must admit I enjoy this routine and feel very good with the consultant way of life, even after I had to spend 1.5 hours in a shaking plane that tried to land 5 times before succeeding because of bad weather, I guess it might change after few years but so far so good!

Jumping into the water

(MBA,Booz) Two weeks had passed since the last time I wrote, in this time I started working on my assignment and found out more about the crazy consulting learning curve.
When I recruited for consulting, one of the things mentioned the most by current consultants was the learning curve, they all spoke of the fast and intense learning and the amazing pace in which things move on during a project. My first two weeks gave me the opportunity to see and feel it first hand! The amount of data I was exposed to and the complexity of the project are amazing, I found myself working on a task that seemed to be simple at the beginning but got more and more complex as it moved on, a simple excel model I designed to resolve it turned into a complex model that is getting even more complex as we move on.
In parallel to that there is a lot to learn about the way Booz works, specific tools and methods, decks’ preparation as well as technical things like submitting expenses and reporting working hours.
The team work experience is also a challenge, my team consists of two principles, few senior associates, few associates and me, above all of that there’s a partner from the Dallas office. The organization is flat by nature so I have a direct connection to anyone I want to talk to and I can present my ideas to anyone in the team, the team itself is very supportive and it’s a great experience working as part of it.
There is a lot of fun involved in this job as well, we have team dinners every week and these are always a fun experience, there are also all kinds of office activities on Fridays and weekends like a happy hour we had on the last Friday or a wine tasting event we will have next week!
To summarize it all in one sentence – so far I’m having a great experience and hope it’ll keep on going on like that!

First week - training

(MBA,Booz) So my first week in Booz & Co was spent in a nice hotel in New Brunswick - NJ, it was a very busy week in which we gained tools to help us succeed in our assignments.

Topics included Excel and Power Point training, team work assignment that imitated the real world in which few work streams have to coordinate between themselves to achieve a common goal, additional topics included legal and technical issues and IT systems used by Booz & Co , it was the first time for me to meet the tools used by a consulting firm to run its operations and I must admit I was impressed, specifically by an office plug in that make presentation making much easier and effective and saves a lot of precious time - a critical tool when it comes to working on super tight schedules.

In parallel it was a great opportunity to have a lot of fun with our fellows from the class of summer 2010, each night after dinner a bar tab was open till late night and at the last night together we all went to have dinner in a fancy NY restaurant! to make the whole experience even better we had the opportunity to demonstrate our artistic abilities by performing self written skits about our future life as consultants.

Last but not least – we got our assignments, mine is in Oklahoma, I don’t know yet which parts are confidential so I won’t specify much, but I can say that I couldn’t have asked for a better assignment, it seems that it will be a great learning opportunity in a field I’m eager to study!

Friday was suppose to be our first day at the office, though we were lucky to have the opportunity to take part in Booz day and celebrate Booz’s 2^nd anniversary after the separation from Booz Allen Hamilton, it was a great opportunity for me to meet almost all of the Dallas office in one place and to learn more about the office’s and Booz’s culture and aspirations for the coming year. And then came the reason I’m here for – becoming a consultant, I met some of my team mates and participated on my first team conference call, later on I scheduled my flights and hotels for the next two weeks and took a deep dive into reading relevant articles for my assignment.

Next week will be my first week on site, I am sure that it will be very challenging and demanding and I can’t wait to start it, wish me luck!

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!

To consult or not to consult? or how did I get so far

(MBA,Booz) Beginning to write is always the hardest, once few words are already written the whole operation becomes natural and easy :-)

So who am I?

My name is Rotem, a student from Israel who relocated to the US to pursue a MBA at Ross.

Besides studying, I spent the past eight months exploring the internship opportunities and learning a lot about the different roles and industries. As time passed by I came to the understanding that I would like to become a consultant or work at High-Tech. How are these two connected? that's a good question! I can't draw a clear line that connects both of these opportunities, though I can say that preparing for recruiting in two different industries was not easy at all. In fact I quite failed to prepare for the High-Tech part of the deal... luckily I received a consulting offer that put me right where I wanted to be :-)

So this summer I'll be interning with Booz & Co. in Dallas, which I find very appealing as the Michigan winter was found to be a bit too cold and snowy for me - I'm still Mediterranean...

I will be assigned to a team dealing with a strategic IT problem that one of Booz's customers have.

It seems very clear to me that this is where I want to be,but I yet lack the practical experience doing it. From my research on consulting companies, I learned a lot on the challenges of the consultant lifestyle,and now I am looking forward to experience it first hand this summer.

I am really excited about the opportunity to experience hands on team work in a new environment, I believe it will be a major challenge.

Before I end this post, I would like to share what I take to be the three most important things I learned through my consulting recruiting experience:

- 1st and most important - have a backup, unfortunately, out of more than hundred students who want to intern as consultants, only few tens receive an offer - which might leave you offer less! don't give up though - it's a two year process and full time offers are much more generously given! but as for the internship - choose another industry you are passionate about and prepare for its interviews.

- 2nd, start as early as possible, prepare your resume , consult your peers and second year OCD consultants and practice cases and fit with them to be as ready as possible for your interviews.

- Having that said - don't burn yourself! taking 5 cases a day will be less effective for most of us than taking only 2 and concentrating on the learning from each one of them.

Best,

Rotem