My first two weeks in New York Citi- Part 2 of "from CPG to Banking"

Hello everyone,
Has been a while since I posted my first blog. You may think that the title of this  second one is a miss spelling, however it is not. I just didn't want to be one more person talking about Citibank, as I just saw that my intern classmates have been very active.
The ver first week went by very quickly. We had a trainning during the whole week, along with some networking events and an speech of the CEO of Citibank consumer banking division, Manuel Medina Mora, who happens to be a mexican that has a long career in the banking industry. This conference, was just the cherry on the cake that confirmed the things that I am enjoying at Citibank. First. Diversity of backgrounds, and second,  approachable senior management. As I consider both relevant elements when it comes to build a strong organizational culture. Also, they come very useful when evaluating whether I see myself  working for Citi in the future, because, from an international student perspective, I would not like to be working in a place in which thediversity in background is not appreciated. Another thing that I have enjoyed from the program so far, is the caliber of the interns. I can tell that I've had interactions with people from all of the  top 15 business schools. Which has been a great opportunity not only to expand my network, but also to realize that The University of Michigan, Ross Business School, is very well positioned in the MBA market. Now, starting my second week, I have to confess that  going back to work after eleven months, is like working out, you need to keep up with your condition! It is not a big deal, but it is something that needs to be practiced again. Additionally, as it has been for other classmates, when  defining deliverables, it is not as easy as I had thought. I realized that my project is more ambiguous than I though, as it has to do with launching a new business model, which deals with increasing revenues, strategy and marketing. As a result, there are some roles that are still unclear in my team, but, the upside of this is that I am having the opportunity to work in something entrepreneurial, something very rare in a big organization like Citi. (You may have seen that also Citi just turned 200 years, and it is just  starting the 3th century of life ). The project has been great to leverage on my previous MAP experience as a team-member and on my Strategy classes. So far, I can tell that the project has exceeded my expectations, even though I still have to figure things out and develop many frameworks to deal with the unknown of a new business model.
I will keep you posted.
Miguel

First week with Citi 200 years, done!

My first week of summer internship at Citibank was over before I had time to worry that if I am ready to go back to work after being on holiday for about two months. My first week started in New York with other 36 MBA students from some of the top business schools around the country, including Wharton, Columbia, Haas and Cornell to name a few. Everyone was so excited to get to know each other on the first day and was so happy to be part of the Citi Consumer Banking Summer Associate Program for 2012. The Bank organized some of the senior leaders from different business functions to meet and talk to us about what they do on a daily basis, the challenges they face and the opportunities ahead. With almost no time to rest for jet legs and adjust for time differences, I found the information I got in the first two days was overwhelming. However, the excitement about my summer project with CitiMortgage and the great new friends that I made have really kept me going through the week.

The last day of the week was my first day to report to CitiMortgage Ann Arbor office. During a quick catch up with my manager over a cup of coffee, he wanted me to take up a major role in facilitating the expansion of an operation center in Danville, IL. The project includes hiring new stuff and analyzing calls from a huge data base for this busy inbound call center for CitiMortgage’s super streamline business approaches. The project is challenging in its complex nature, but I am really excited about it and the opportunity to pull it off. When I was writing this blog, I am working from this office about 400 miles away from Ann Arbor and will be here for the rest of the week.

There will be lots of hard work ahead of me this summer. However, there also will be lots of activities and events that I will enjoy during weekends and time offs. I am sure that it will be a great summer.

First week at Citi

Citigroup’s SFMA is a well-organized program. I received the summer position placement document from Citi in mid-May. It includes 8 positions within the global finance area. Each position came with description of its department, tasks, requirement and perspective. Later on, I found out that there were only 8 of us in the SFMA program, and each of us got placed in a different team. It is a bit sad that we will not see each other much after the training week, but this structure provides us a way to broaden our network within the company, and learn as much as we want about other teams.

The first week started with presentations given by CFOs of the Institutional Clients Group (ICG) and Global Consumer Banking (GBC). It was as much a presentation as a conversation. We all had plenty of time to ask CFOs questions. During the week, directors and controllers of Treasury, Financial Planning & Analysis, Corporate Accounting policy and Tax gave us a brief introduction to their team. The managing director of Treasury reminded us that the Key to financial management is not getting into details of rules and regulation reform, but to think logically and act ethically. We also had breakfast chats with our junior and senior mentors. Everyone I have met so far at Citi is extremely knowledgeable and supportive. Through out the summer, we will participate in speaker series from top executives of Citi.

In addition, this year is the 200-year anniversary of Citigroup. As members of Citigroup, my colleagues and I went out on Thursday to paint a local community park. It was a great time to meet people from consumer banking group, and give something back to the community.

Working Smarter

    The past few weeks at Four Wood Capital Partners have been pretty eventful. In terms of my own assignments, I've been at work on a myriad of projects. Some of these were doing research reports on our firm's competitors, creating a model for our high net worth client strategy, analyzing trends in real estate investment trusts (REITs), and putting together daily market summaries. Anyway, it doesn't seem like I've been given my big summer project yet (although working on our High Net Worth Client Strategy has been going on now for a few weeks, and it has drawn a lot of attention from various directors and managers in the firm). Nonetheless, I still have yet to get placed on a live deal.

    When it comes to getting work done, I've found that most of the people in the office with more experience are willing to give feedback and lend a hand to our group of interns. After all, none of us have significant real world experience. Their advice has helped a lot in knowing what to focus on and look for. One of the big takeaways so far has been the importance of developing work in a manner, such that anybody could understand the message by looking at a slide. It makes sense considering that investing activities are not exclusive to highly educated or sophisticated individuals. While we still need to make sure our research checks out and that all the work is accurate, keeping it understandable seems to be a very important point to remember for presentations and explanations.

    Working with supervisors has been relatively enjoyable so far. Most, as mentioned before, are generally helpful and willing to give guidance and explain what they want to see in our work. One thing all supervisors enjoy is hearing about interns and their social lives. Seriously, they love to hear about it. Moving on. At times, it can be tricky to work with multiple supervisors who have different objectives. However, I have found it easiest to collaborate with both supervisors and let them both take the credit for the great idea. I'm just hoping to keep my head down, learn a lot, and get new insights from more experienced professionals. It will be interesting to see if this strategy can work all summer long.

Interning with Booz & Co - SETTLED IN!!!

Blog Post #2! - June 17th 

Hi all,

It has been a ridiculously busy first week of work. In addition to training which was hosted in Washington, for I met a 50+ interns from all over the world, my family and I moved from Toronto/Ann Arbor to Chicago.

1 day after moving in, I learned that my client site will be in Boston for the entire summer! Such is the life of consulting :)

As I have only had training to this point, I have yet to experience the Booz & Co office environment. And on that note, Booz & Co, not Booz Allen Hamilton which is a completely separate business that we are unaffiliated too.

In addition I will travel directly to the clients site next week, so the office environment will have to wait. However I am expecting an entirely different work culture from my previous life. Travelling Mon-Thur with people I do not know, but fully expect to develop very strong personal and business relationships with should be exciting.

One thing that became very clear from training, is that consultants want to work with people that they genuinely like. We are going to spend more time with each other than our own families, we will be stuck in airports together, miss flights together, etc. We better really enjoy each others company!

My client is in the financial services industry, and I'll be working with a team supporting optimization of their IT infrastructure, as I am part of Booz & Co's IT Strategy practice. 

In terms of personal support, Booz & Co has made a huge effort! I have been assigned a junior and senior mentor from the Chicago practice. The Job Manager of my project has overloaded me with information, and I am still days behind on reviewing all of the material from orientation. There is no shortage of work or challenges, and I am expecting an awesome summer.

Finally, from a settling into Chicago perspective, we are still getting our feet wet. Only been here 2 nights, its an awesome city and reminds me of my hometown (Toronto). Friendly people, excellent food (DEEP DISH PIZZA's...500 calories per slice at least), hot summers (30C+ each day). I hope to find some time for golf on the weekends.

Until next time, 

Cheers!

Omair

Getting started with work....

As I reflect on my internship job seeking experience, I would like to stress again and again to prospective international students about coming to campus in fighting form in terms of learning how to network and developing a killer resume. 

Easy things first......if you got into business school, you already have what it takes to be a leader, you now need to develop a concise one page resume of your career, extracurricular achievements and leadership roles.....easier said than done....ONE PAGE!!....For most international applicants, a one page resume is not the norm.  Having lived in Australia, India and Nigeria, where you drive on the other side of the road, I know how difficult it is to create an effective one page resume. At my summer internship company, interns are expected to have up-to-date resumes on day one.

It is important to network during the internship as well....not only with prospective companies but also within prospective business lines at your current internship company. 

Networking within my internship company or your (going to be) company starts with defining your summer project in a manner that gives you maximum outreach possibilities. Summer projects are not very structured, most are fairly ambiguous and they involve working with cross-functional teams. It is important to set expectations with your supervisor, setting and planning regular meetings and getting contacts with the relevant teams upfront. Most companies will also ask you to get a few referrals at the end of your project and hence you need to continue networking within the organization.  Needless to say maintaining cordial relationships with one’s supervisor is critical to getting a job offer. Towards this, learn your bosses’ management style and adapt so that you seem amicable, approachable and friendly. Also, your work will most likely involve a presentation to management about your project’s achievements and so it would be a good start to brush up presentation skills upfront.

To conclude: networking, defining your summer project and maintaining an amicable and good relationship with your supervisor is critical to converting your internship into a full time job offer.

Understanding My Manager!

Hey guys, I’m back to share my first few weeks experience at Dell. First of all I feel good going back to where I started my career in terms of function - marketing. However the first question is: Is marketing in banking the same as marketing in Hi-tech...Hmmm not totally the same but you need the same set of skills which I got. Understanding my manager could have been a great challenge, working with a director that has been on the job for over 15 years, perhaps his expectations should be high. Fortunately I have a good manager that understand my predicaments and knows how to express complex situation in a simple illustration. He’s a great listener and good on feedbacks. He gives weekly feedbacks on my performance. Also I had meetings with some of his team members and they shared a valuable insight on working with him.
On my project, after several brainstorming sections with my manager, I had to come up with a presentation on the project’s high level framework and weekly deliverables. I never imagined how wide the scope of my project was until I had a one on one presentation with some directors. Probably everybody has a different perception on the project. Going by everybody’s suggestion, it’s obvious the project is going to take forever. At this point I concluded that it’s important to have a strategic section with my manager on the possibility of narrowing down the scope of the project so as to be more focus.  
I made my manager see reasons why it’s necessary to be more specific on the scope of the project and he agreed with me. So I was able to identify the problem to be solved. And he came up with list of relevant people that their insight and feedback would be of value to the execution of my project. I did schedule one on one meeting with them and their response and contribution has been awesome. I have started to think of how I can build my future career around these great people.

"If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful."

Okay, so this latest blog entry sees me posting from the wonderful city of Seattle where my stomach has been treated to the gastronomical wonders of 99-cent oysters (self-shucked), geoduck sashimi, fresh salmon and awesome Chinese food. As you can tell from my incessant focus on food after having spent too many months in Ann Arbor, I am truly a Singaporean at heart. Ironically, I don’t recall drinking more than two cups of Starbucks since I got here so that’s one prediction I got wrong.

What I did get right was the dynamic, fast-paced and innovative can-do culture that permeates the workplace here at Amazon’s main offices in the South Lake Union district of Seattle. While most people see the firm as an e-commerce giant who offers everything from cell phones and Kindle devices to streaming video and fresh groceries, it really feels like a big startup where everybody works hard to deliver the best possible experience to the customer. The excitement and energy in this place is simply astounding, something you would not expect from an industry giant with a market cap of $100B.

And when it comes to Amazon, the customer is truly king. Other firms may pay lip service to the notion of customer care, but here at AMZN, it’s not just a customer focus – it’s a customer obsession. You see it everywhere, from top-level managerial decisions down to the way the call centers handle inquiries. It truly makes a difference in the way the company works and it is this that differentiates Amazon from all the other companies out there.

For all my misconceptions of Amazon being an exceptionally frugal company – door-desks come to mind –  I found myself surprised to be given a keychain, water bottle and Kindle Touch on my first few days at work. In fact, everyone got brand new Lenovo Thinkpads, which might have more to do with the firm’s rapidly expanding headcount than actual employee pampering, but it feels good to have a new laptop to work on. So for those of you out there who were concerned about that whole frugality thing, fear not.

Random AMZN fact: One of the buildings here is named Rufus after a dog belonging to Amazon’s former editor-in-chief. Thanks to his pioneering efforts, everyone’s four-legged best friends are welcome in the majority of Amazon’s buildings.

To sum it up, my first few weeks here at AMZN have been a blast with a high-energy workplace, enthusiastic colleagues, brand new buildings, great (albeit expensive) cafeteria food and high-impact projects. I look forward to updating everyone on the wonders of elevators with whiteboard walls in my next post.

In the meantime, if you love your music, check out the Amazon Cloud Player (now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch) which allows you to access all of your music, wherever you are, on all the devices you use. Buy once and enjoy your music everywhere without worrying about storage on your devices. You get 5GB of free storage for starters and can upgrade it starting at a mere $1.75 per month. Visit www.amazon.com for more details.

Some of my new colleagues on the third floor.

Formula 1

Hi again,

So, Argentina is over. As I told you before, soccer is a big deal and I’m attaching a little video I took in the stadium while watching the last game the national team played in Buenos Aires. But well, I’m back in the US but this doesn’t mean excitement is over. Before leaving for Argentina a month ago, I started preparing a kick-off trip to the Formula 1 race in Montreal for the cooperation between Magneti Marelli and Mopar in Canada. Time is flying by and as soon as I got back from South America I had to go to Canada.

Gladly, after a busy week working with planning and logistics, everything worked perfectly during the weekend and the attendants went back home extremely confident on the future of the joint venture between both companies. But the trip was not all work. The main event of the weekend was the Formula 1 race, which happened to be extremely exciting. Formula 1 fans reading won’t let me lie when I say that the way in which the race developed made it one of the most exciting ones in the season so far. Attached, you will be able to find a video of the first competitors on the last lap of the race, with Lewis Hamilton leading.

Continuing with the kick-offs, now I’m on the planning of a trip to Miami in a couple of weekends with people from Mopar Mexico. Hopefully, the success of this event would be as good as the ones before and the relation between professionals of both companies start with the right foot. On my next post, I will talk more about how the event went and my future plans for the internship.

It’s always sunny in Chicago! At least during the summer it is :-)

Chicago skyline

It’s been a week of many firsts – first week of my internship, first time living in Chicago, first time living completely on my own – no roommates, no nobody. I have to say seven days ago I was pretty anxious about how this adventure is going to turn out but so far so good!

My first week at Groupon went by fast – I actually cannot believe 10% of my internship are already gone between learning about the company, getting to know my team and getting back into work mode. I feel really lucky that the culture at Groupon is pretty laid back, people are extremely friendly and welcoming, willing to help and yet giving you the freedom to go explore on your own and define your own adventure, which makes the school-work transition pretty seamless.

I am a part of the Marketing team and more specifically the Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) team which is mainly focusing on consumer activation. For perspective, Groupon has about 40 million subscribers out of which only about 30% are active users (meaning they buy Groupons) at any given point of time. And that’s when the CRM team comes into play – the goal of the team is to get as many subscribers as possible to become active users and also to reward our best subscribers for their loyalty. 

As you can imagine, like any online business Groupon has no shortage of data, however the big question is how to organize and synthesize these data in a way that’s meaningful and allows people to make better-informed decisions. That’s what I will be tackling this summer – identifying KPIs (key performance indicators), thinking about consumer segmenting and then designing and working on implementing a reporting system. But before I can do all that I have to learn Groupon-speak. It always amazes me how many acronyms people use at every firm!

Outside of work, I’ve been exploring Chicago. I have to say before coming here I didn’t quite understand why all the people who’ve ever spent a summer in Chicago say it is so amazing but a week in I am starting to understand. There are so many events and festivals organized by the city authorities! Just this past weekend there were at least three festivals – an arts fair, a blues festival and a ribs fest. How amazing is that?! I am really excited for what’s yet to come and I’ll keep you all posted.

Sleepless in Seattle:         Network, Network, Network

How time flies… I’m in my 5^th week of the internship and I try to network as much as possible. I Network with people in my team, in my division, in my company and with other MBA’s. Most of the network is done through lunch meetings and coffee breaks – you probably know what I’m talking about. Although it is pretty easy to stay in my room, crunching presentations and data to provide some sort of useful output to my group I prefer to fill-up my day with meetings – and my nights with the crunching and reading and processing the data.

My networking can be divided into 3 types. The first is the most important one – the internal division network. I am engaging in meetings and casual conversations with people from my own group and division to learn about them and their day2day work. To understand how they could help me with my project, what is it like to work with and around them and just to enjoy the company of very smart and fun people. The second kind is the future type – I try to meet with people from different divisions and different roles in the company to understand how the big picture comes together, to see the vision of other people in different positions around the company. The third type is the MBA connection – I try to attend all the organized events that the Microsoft recruiters sponsor and the unofficial ones also.

But more than everything I try to manage time to be with my family. I haven’t seen them for 4 weeks and my entire first MBA year was mainly around recruiting and networking, so the time I spent with my wife and kids was pretty limited. I can’t say I have much more time now but it is much better than before. So most of the days I try to be home around 19:00-20:00 be with my kids for couple of hours and back to some work around 23:00.

                                                                                                                Till next time,

                                                                                                                                Barak

Exciting first week

It has been a very busy but fruitful week! I started by flying to Atlanta for my 1st stage - 3 days training. I am very excited to find that we have interns from almost all 50 states of US. There are several Rossers in the crowd.

We had a series of workshops led by experts to introduce the company culture and some methodologies and tools that could apply to work. We were divided to different groups to simulate the real consulting team to solve a business problem. This exercise gave us a general idea of consulting and also prepared us with some basic steps to approach problems. After the training at the second day, we had a great networking and dinner event with some partners.

We finished the first stage training at the third day, and then I flied to my home office – San Francisco for my second stage training. San Francisco is a very beautiful city, built on mountains and besides the Pacific Ocean. I really like the weather here. It is a bit cool but very refreshing.  Its public transportation is very convenient. I commute to the city by taking BART (like subway).

I am very glad to find that I was assigned with a peer advisor who just joined the firm about one year ago. He could help me with any problem I may have during my day to day job. I also have a counselor, who is a senior level person in the firm and he can help me to plan my career path in the firm and point out direction for me. Most importantly, he will be the person evaluate me in the end of the internship.

The Last day of the training is a community event. This year we went to a charity organization to do some volunteer works.

2 weeks in NYC and counting!

It's crazy how fast time goes by in New York City. I've been here for 2 weeks now, and I have not had a day when I have nothing to do. I came here 2 weeks ago, and spent everyday of the first week learning to get around the city, find places to buy groceries, etc. Going from Michigan to Manhattan, I was really overwhelmed by the amount of people I see everyday, and I'm still not used to getting stuck in a crowd almost all the time. Interestingly, just by walking around the city, I've bumped into classmates from Michigan - glad to see that many Michigan students are having great internships in the city! After a week, I still did not get to see even half of the city. But at least I know where I can go to get what I need :)

This week was training week for my internship. It was an intensive 5 day training of accounting, finance and learning how to use the databases that I will be using at work. I got to meet a good number of the people in the intern class, made some friends that I will hopefully be touch with, and got to see the floor I will be working at. I will be working with equity capital markets group this summer, and so far, I've only met my supervisors. They are really nice and have promised that we will be getting a great learning experience. I've also met the 5 other interns allocated to the group, and everyone seems to be bonding well and have plans to get together outside of work. I will be starting at my desk this Monday and because of the nature of my group, I actually have to get into work at 7am everyday, but I may actually get out at 7pm. That is actually not typical of investment banking, as many of you may know that bankers typically work till 12am or even pull all nighters. That said, it remains to be seen if I actually get off earlier. Overall, I'm really excited to get on the team this Monday and to meet everyone on the team.

Mind the gap.

Doing your internship in a field you are familiar with is both a blessing and a curse. You can dive right in, only to find yourself knee-high in research before you even know the name of the co-worker in the cube next to yours. You are relieved to know you are high on the learning curve, but you question whether it would not have been better for you to experience something completely new. You are confident you know the material, the industry, the products and the market, but you doubt your ability to bring completely fresh insights to the table. You can rush to catch the fastest train to Deliverable Street station, but you constantly have to mind the gap: what might I be missing that the executives already know, or that another fresh, bright MBA intern would not miss?

Because a summer internship is a little like the metro system at rush hour: you scurry your way through a crowd of people that you should really stop to talk to for a bit rather than hurry to the next stop, and you do not want to surface before it is truly time. Some people seem to get tempted to work so hard on achieving strong deliverables, that it almost beats the purpose.

Everyone will tell you to enjoy this experience. Everyone will also tell you to make the best of it. Everyone is right and no one is able to tell you how to do those things. It is up to you to figure it out.

I love unwinding in Austin. This town has a great mix of indoors and outdoors fun. It is already close to 100 F. in mid-day, but I am able to enjoy it nonetheless so far. At least for this summer, I can think of no other place where I'd rather be.

Hello Seattle!

Hey there!

Its good to be back here on the blog. The last two weeks have just flown by. I got to Seattle on the 1st

(remember I told you in my first post that I will be interning at Microsoft this summer), so yeah, got here, and drove directly to the apartments that Microsoft ("MS") arranged for us. And lo and behold!- these apartments are bang in the middle of downtown Seattle, just minutes away from the famous Pike Place Market and the beautiful harbor!!!

The weekend was inconsequential as I bought the basics to settle into my fully furnished service apartment. and then the week began....
Monday was orientation day (called NEO- New Employee Orientation) at MS where about a 100-200 full time employees, about 500-600 undergrad interns and 20 MBA interns started their journey at MS. Yes, we later found out that MS received 3000 MBA applications for internships, they interviewed 892 applicants and finally 60 of us made it through- I feel honored to be part of this extremely smart group of individuals. So the class of interns at MS was a good mix from the top 10 schools- but one thing was common among all of us- I found every one of my peers extremely down-to-earth and amicable. And that made so much sense when I met the MS team that I will be working with during the summer.

People at MS are like that- brilliant and modest. They like to have fun even as they work really hard and every five minutes I hear people cracking up into laughter in the corridor outside my office. So on Tuesday, I was introduced to my team in the Microsoft Office Division and I felt very much a part of this team very quickly. My mentor introduced me to all the members of the 8-member team and briefed me on the details of the project. My summer project is about the transition of MS's customers in the business productivity space to cloud computing- yes- its looking at the existing and future strategy for the  exciting new Office 365!!!! This is an exciting time in Redmond, as Microsoft prepares to compete with Google in the area of cloud computing.

As I began working on my project, I realized two very important things that I learned at Ross, which I am applying directly to my project-
1) The way I look at problems has become so much more structured
2) Complexity and overload of information doesn't seem to bother me anymore (especially after those strategy cases which every Rosser will agree were info overloads!), enabling me to filter the more important pieces of information and focusing on those.

Outside of the project work, my team members (both senior and junior) had taken me out to lunch and on tours of the Microsoft Commons (they have awesome food and shops- even a massage parlor and salon!) on three out of the four working days I have been here. So far, I'm loving this casual environment- yes! I'm wearing jeans and t-shirts to work everyday!!!!!!!!!!!!!...some more !!!!! It's a big change from NYC and I'm loving it! Now off to tour the Pike place market and enjoy the Seattle downtown! Will be back with some more news next time..Chao!