Dreaming Wide Awake - My Summer Internship At Deloitte USI

I had the opportunity to work on two very different projects during my stint with Deloitte. One was to develop a playbook that would aid business leaders in making global mobility decisions more efficient and effective for all of Deloitte’s global deployments to 150+ countries. The second project was to position Deloitte’s leaders as people who inspire more trust and respect of their employees.

It seemed a little overwhelming at the outset, being the only HR intern with two projects but a day later I was looking at a Gantt Chart that had my internship drilled down to each day. Things move fast at Deloitte. Mostly you would see interns suited up, running between the fourteen blocks of the company in Hyderabad, meeting business leaders and employees in a constant effort to make their projects more meaningful and aligned to the organization. All the work we did was deeply rooted in research and driven by data. In the same breath, this GPTW organization is a pioneer for promoting work-life balance too. It does so by an effortless integration of work and life. There was no reporting time or a mandatory number of hours that we had to clock at office. In fact, we were given the freedom to work from any place we wanted to, at any hour we wanted to. At times we would bounce ideas off each other at the local brewery and at other times we would discuss our favourite bands on the office floor. Work had never been more fun.

Deloitte taught me to look at a problem through a different set of lenses. I learnt to identify the business need, to chart out a detailed action plan and to measure the impact of my actions to the business. I learnt to be thorough with each step of my action plan – there was no place for half-baked work. I learnt the art of storyboarding – presenting my project in the form of a fluid story, connecting the dots like a constellation. I learnt impeccable presentation skills and how to field questions with confidence in a room full of leaders. I came out of the internship a more polished and sophisticated person than I had ever been.

Like smoldering embers, there will always be a little Deloitte in me wherever I go. And I hope it stays that way.

About the Author

Satyaki Dutta is pursuing his Masters in Human Resource Management and Labour Relations at TISS, Mumbai. Earlier, he used to code for a living for companies like Infosys Ltd. and Labvantage Solutions. When the going gets tough, he picks up a book or tunes into Netflix.