I worked six years at the TATA House following my graduation in 2015. After spending six years of working in the corporate, I was motivated to advance my position as a strategist. My interest in Management Consulting was sparked by my interactions with top consultants at my company, and I wanted to learn more about its prospects. Bagging an internship at PwC India in their Management Consulting arm helped me amass great insights into this space and broaden my knowledge in a different domain, which I’ll cover later in the article.
The practice was the key and the rest followed:
To begin with the preparation, I can’t stress more about acing the behavioural round. BITSoM had organised multiple resume-based behavioural sessions with experts from diverse industries. These sessions, followed by individual face time with the experts aided me in peeling through layers of my experience, stitching a compelling story about my journey and aligning the achievements with the job profile.
Regarding my first round of interviews, this preparation was helpful. My interviewer asked me a few situational questions throughout this part of the interview. I backed up my arguments with instances from my work. I had experience with a digital transformation effort that required management of organizational-wide change. My interviewer questioned me about the difficulties in achieving stakeholder alignment and the recurrent interventions we utilised to scale the transformation. It made it simpler for me to engage my interviewer in meaningful dialogue.
There were two folds in the technical round that came after. After asking me to evaluate a scenario using my knowledge of market entrance, my interviewer asked me to estimate the number of online orders placed in my residential society. This exchange went on for 30 minutes. An interview with the partner served as the concluding shot. The interviewer sought to determine how well I understood the industry and whether I would be a good fit for the position during our brief (15-minute) talk.
There were challenges, but the highs compensated:
In less than six months, my internship at PwC had begun. I had numerous learning chances throughout those two months, both at work and outside of it. My client was an Agritech start-up that recently became a member of the $1 Bn club. I extensively collaborated with their C-suite to restructure their organisational structure, develop effective finance processes, and support their branding strategy. I had daily learning that was magnified because the client functioned in a fast-moving environment. Working with this customer gave me a taste of the startup world, something I had often wanted to explore.
As I was exposed to finance, operations, and marketing, my learning curve was quite steep. My paradigm for learning was revved up by the experience of working with a start-up customer.
In addition to my job, I was chosen as the lone intern for PwC India Squad 2.0, the top 30/500, and was admitted as a knowledge influencer for PwC India. I took part in the management consulting community's Friday fun time competitions and frequently won.
I was lucky to experience the best of both worlds- a hybrid mode of working. My team's contributions were crucial to the success of this learning process. The creation of two significant policy frameworks for evaluating vendor and customer fit was one of the most satisfying assignments. This was a high-priority ask by the client. My colleagues trusted me with the end-to-end delivery of the frameworks even though I had no prior fintech knowledge. They thought I might provide the customer journey with a novel viewpoint. I must admit that these were quite difficult tasks. Once I believed the work was complete, I would discover five additional subtleties. I had to start over each time I remarked, "This is finished." As I hit the ceiling, my team pushed me. They set me up with a financial expert within the company who became my go-to source for clarifying my understanding. This assisted me in providing the client with significant deliverables that are now essential components of their operations. These critical deliverables[SK3] [MK4] - were daunting at the beginning but amped up my confidence multifold. The trust of the team pushed me to stretch and break that ceiling.
And the college stood by at all steps:
The classes we took in year one, along with the interview preparation that BITSoM facilitated, made a big difference in how I approached my job. When building frameworks from scratch, I can remember applying ideas from the "Design Thinking" course that Dr Rajan Banerjee, the Founding Dean of BITSoM, taught. The management deserves a large portion of the credit for connecting me with the appropriate individuals and pointing me toward resources for a few of the market research projects I carried out for my proposals. In another task when I had to create the organisational structure for the client, Prof. Leena helped me tremendously.
Being praised by the business makes me feel accomplished. When I look back on the process, I believe that all the key players—BITSoM management, my PwC team, and my family—worked together as an ally to achieve the desired outcome. They cared about me, therefore I tried to present myself in the best possible light.