“Sell your senior”, they call it. I got a very funny submission for this task from one of these juniors and I planned to meet him. He was almost as curious as I was when I had joined MDI. He asked many questions but one that made me reflect on my internship experience was – “Did you always want to go into consulting?”
I went back to the time of summer placements and I saw myself facing one of the partners of a consulting firm. It was 7:30 AM and it was too early for any of us to begin to expect anything from that selection process. We were sitting in a room after the interviews and the placement committee member called me out and announced a spot offer. It was so unexpected that it took me about 15-20 minutes to come to terms with the fact that I was going to be interning with that firm, not because I didn’t want to, but because I had no expectations as such. That is how I landed into consulting – ‘just being myself’ – studying as much as I wanted to, not trying to impress during GD and PI, but just conveying my true intent and self.
That has made me think that you will always land up at the right place if you just be yourself. The recruiters recruit the person and not just the skillset, not the theory or facts you memorize. So making sure that you let them know who you are will ensure that you get into the right place.
It was right for me. I know because looking back at those 2 months, I can say that I could have spent more time there and I have done some good work. First week was almost as it must have been for most of us – the induction, allotment of laptops and IDs, introduction with the team, the manager and the co-interns except for me, I was allotted a buddy who spent almost 3 hours with me on the third day itself of my internship and explained to me in detail what my project was going to be about.
It was very overwhelming in the beginning. But, that’s when I realized that had it not been for my first year at MBA, I would have miserably failed at understanding a lot of what he was talking. Honestly, earlier I was not very excited about the idea of internship as the previous experience during my engineering, when it comes to internships, had not been great. After those long hours of rigorous discussion, I got so excited, that the same evening I met a friend who could teach me Excel, as one of the deliverables was a dashboard in Excel.
I started reading about the client, their processes and the concept we were trying to apply to the problem at hand. Each evening, I was full of questions and had long discussions with my buddy and my manager. They suggested that I apply our concept to real life scenarios or to my previous work experience for better understanding. I started working on it and prepared a slide titled – “Applying XYZ on my previous area of work”. It was my first original contribution to this project and while I discussed it with my manager, I felt so confident that I knew that I was going to deliver something of value in the end. This also led to one good learning that abstract concepts could be hard to understand or explain but once you apply them to something you understand, they become easy and convincing.
Now, this application that I created would be easy to understand for people who understand IT, but we needed a more generic proof-of-concept. Meanwhile, we were working on the Excel dashboard. I had never worked with Excel before, so the challenge became fun. I started watching tutorials on how we could make our dashboard interactive and attractive. I learnt how to make gadgets like speedometers, traffic light indicators etc. and made some very flashy dashboards. They all got rejected. But, I was too enthusiastic by now to get disheartened, so I met my manager regarding this. He explained that although those dashboards looked very attractive, the client would never understand them. He drew a simple block diagram on a paper and asked me to redesign the dashboard that simple. I started again and made a very simple dashboard with blocks showing the data. He approved of it. “I can explain this to any of my clients now”, he said. I think that made sense, we needed a solution, not decoration.
My buddy and I again sat one day and he said that he wanted to pitch that concept to another client and we needed a very simple analogy for him to understand our solution. My IT analogy would not work. We decided that we will look into something that everyone can easily associate with, something such as sports. We narrowed it down to IPL.
I went home that weekend to read about IPL in detail. I prepared two slides on how IPL works due to similar constructs that our solution offered. A few days later, on Sunday evening, I got a text from my buddy – “Your slides were killer! The client loved them.” It was a little unexpected as I knew that those slides were very easy to understand due to the simple analogy to sports, but could they sell a product? Apparently, they could. So, I think the key is – “Keep it simple”. And of course, whenever stuck, just look around. The solution is mostly around you- may be on the TV screen in front of you, all you need is a perspective.
We had our mid-review in the first week of the second month. There were senior managers in the panel. This was the first time I was presenting this concept we had worked on for a month and my buddy sat there with very high hopes. He was certain that we were going to create an impact. I presented and answered some questions but we saw no impact. What went wrong? I had no clue. Was I too fast? Was I nervous? Is there a problem with the slides? Next day, I called my buddy and asked for his feedback. He just said that it didn’t seem like I had created something and I was passionate about it. There was no rigour. What did that mean? What was I supposed to do? I talked to some friends and they just said that it could be nervousness.
I had my final presentation on the last day of my internship and all I had thought about since the mid-review was – “How do I seem passionate?” In the morning before the presentation, I went to buy a gift for my buddy. I wanted to thank him for his continuous and invaluable support. Then, I reached office and went in for the presentation with the partner. I came out and called my buddy as he was not in office that day. He asked, “What did she say?” I told him that she said that she saw the rigour in me.
Those were two memorable months with a lot to learn, a lot to be thankful for and although there is no answer to – “Did I always want to go into consulting?” we have an answer to – “Would I like to go into consulting now?”