Very Long Summer | Microsoft Diaries

I had to leave campus with only 2 days to say goodbye to my college life, campus, friends, and batchmates who have become more like a family within the last 1 year of life at ISB. I was somewhat relieved that I was getting released from the routine ordeal of classes, assignments, and exams but there was anxiousness of flying away from our safe zone into real life. Then came the nationwide lockdown which was supposed to last only 21 days but stretched for more than 2 months.

Hanging between all these trivia was my wedding, my job, my honeymoon vacation, and my whole career.  My consulting job offer which was supposed to start in may, just after my wedding and honeymoon, has been pushed into uncertainty. Somehow looking at the analyst reports on social distancing remaining in life till year-end, my family decided to go ahead with the wedding with only 10 guests in attendance instead of planned 500. Because of the whole uncertainty around permission for the wedding, I didn't inform my friends, ex-colleagues, and batchmates about my wedding plans and I still have to listen to complaints from them regarding that.

With even increasing education loan amount and not much of the savings left, worry about career and job always lurks in the back of your mind. Hence when I across internship project with CII on LinkedIn, I thought of it as a great opportunity to engage myself till my job starts. After application and resume review, I was shortlisted for the project and was supposed to lead a team of 7 from various premium institutes of country i.e. IIM, IIT, IMI, NITIE, SIBM under the guidance of industry leader.

It was an experience working remotely on Microsoft teams with such a bright brunch of folks from different institutions. I have worked for 7 years in corporate but there my team members were either juniors or seniors and were all strung by a common goal of profitability for the company. But this was a self-driven industry deep-dive project where the goal is to develop a collaborative demand planning model for one of the industries. All of us have different styles of working, different ideas, and different motivations. Hence, our mentor suggested us to start working individually to first test our approach. In the first week, we all choose our industry and prepared the pitch for the team to work on. We presented an individual pitch to the team in the presence of the mentor. We all added our point of view in support of & in opposition to each individual pitch. Finally, after discussions, we all unanimously decided to proceed with the air cargo industry.

I asked my team for opinions and gave my suggestions on our weekly work distribution and meeting schedules. We used to meet twice informally as a team on MS teams to discuss progress and share ideas on each other's individual projects. And there was twice a week official cadence with our mentor on Wednesday morning 9 am and Saturday 11 am. It was great learning as a consulting assignment. We did a lot of secondary research, referred to data from some paid sources which were accessible through campus accounts, ran data analytics on that data for prediction and forecasting. Even though I was the team leader and another girl was co-team lead, we followed the round-robin approach by giving everyone an opportunity to be moderators during each official meeting. He or she was supposed to collate the individual reports from each team member and compile it is a cohesive interconnected report to be discussed during an official meeting with the mentor.

By the end of 5th week, we wrapped up our project and started working on the presentation which we had to present at the end of the 7th week. We worked on google slides to ensure that we manage by working on a common theme of the presentation and each one was aware of the progress made by the rest of the team. During those last 2 weeks, we met almost every alternate day for cadence. We were the last one amongst 9 teams to make the presentation. Those 2 days on the weekend we sat in front of zoom for more than 10 hours to attend 9 presentations by 9 teams comprising close 70 students from approx 15 Indian and global premier institutions. I got great insights into the supply chain, digital transformation, digital twin, make in India, and supply chain watch tower concepts.

After a week, through peer and jury assessment, we were adjudged as the third-best teams amongst the 9 teams that were part of the CII global summer internship program. It was a great refresher to what the actual life of a consultant is going to be. My wife was supportive through this whole internship while managing her own full-time job.

I personally feel that this internship is great medium to have the real consulting experience and network with industry leaders and your peers from other premium institutions.