So much to learn, so little time...

A few weeks ago, I shared some thoughts on starting my internship. I wanted to follow-up with a few thoughts, now that I have some experience under my belt and a little wisdom (emphasis on little) to share.

A few observations:

1. They don't expect you to know everything. However, they do expect you to learn it very quickly. I would argue that you learn more in consulting, in a shorter period of time, than in any other industry. For example, I learned enough SQL and VBA in the matter of 48 hours to do some heavy duty analytics.

2. Who you work with does matter. When you are spending several hours a day and several days a week with the same people, you need some level of assurance that you will at least enjoy working with your team. The name of the firm doesn't matter if you hate your family on the road. (In my opinion anyways.)

3. Flexibility is key. It is often the case that your work stream will change. Sometimes several changes during the course of a project. Isn't that what we all signed up for?

As for my experience. I love my team. We really are a family on the road. We eat together, stay at the same hotel, share stories. I've very quickly made a handful of close friends just by working and traveling with them for the past 6 weeks. The work is very challenging, but again, the people that I work with make it that much easier to bear.

That being said, I am very excited to be returning to school in a couple weeks. This particular internship has really touched, and expanded upon, nearly every single concept that I learned in my first year of school.

Time for Work

It has been a long time since I last wrote. Since mid-April, I took my finals, moved back to San Francisco, spent massive amounts of time in Napa Valley and prepared for my first day of my internship.

I am very excited as I start tomorrow. I have this feeling almost like I did when I started school, except this time it is a lot more intense but with a lot fewer questions left unanswered.

Do you remember how you felt like when you started undergraduate? You had a ton of questions like what was going to be your major, if this school was the right choice, will you like your classmates, what will you do after you graduate, etc?

Well, entering business school, many of my questions had been answered, but the ones that were still outstanding were very important. Did I make the right decision to leave work for two years in order to change careers? Will I like the people at my school? Will I get as much out of it as I hope to?

Tomorrow, I have a new set of questions, but even more important. The questions remaining for me are:

Will I like the people that I work with? Early polls indicate that, yes, I will. I had very good interactions with representatives of the firm. As long as the people I met were a proxy for the larger group, then I will be fine.

The second question I have revolves around whether or not I will like the work that I am doing. This includes whether or not travel will be ok for my fiancee and me. I have traveled extensively for work in the past, but will it be ok this time around with a significant other. Also, will I like the client work that I am doing? I assume that it will be challenging, but I want to do something that I am passionate about. The next 10 weeks will answer this question for me.

I promise to write more. I won't be able to write about the client work I am doing, but I will be sure to let everyone know how my internship experience is going.

It's Good to Feel Wanted

I feel a sudden sense of relief as I received my first offer for a summer internship. I've been networking pretty heavily in the management consulting arena and I'm very excited to have my first offer. In fact, the offer is from one of my target firms which makes me even happier. The people couldn't be nicer and the work that they do is very interesting to me.

The entire interview process was pretty painless actually. They went from first round interviews to offers within 48 hours. It was pretty amazing. And to tell you the truth, the entire process was actually pretty fun. I really enjoyed the case interviews that I had as they were more discussions about past business problems, so that my interviewer could learn something about me, and I could also learn something from the experience.

I'm still going to see how the other interviews go, but I really do like this first firm. More later as things progress.