Reflections from consulting internships?

Hi everyone,

The MBA monkeys out there should be wrapping up their internships in the next few weeks and heading back to start their second year of school.

Any consulting interns out there want to share pieces of their experience? What surprised you (positives and negatives), what you thought about your fellow interns, thoughts about re-recruiting?

I'll go first: the kids in the BA / AC role (pre-MBA) are smart as hell. The consultants who have done well this summer are the ones that have listened to their younger, experienced colleagues; those who forged blindly ahead under their own egos have struggled.

Also, I think the thickness of a deck is inversely correlated to the quality of analysis in it.

3 Comments
 

When I was a summer, I recall being immediately stuck by my co-workers' ability to make the work seem effortless, while, at the same time, making sure to display that they were putting in a tremendous amount of effort. There's certainly some pressure to make it seem that working an 18-hour day is easy for you.

Learning how to be relentlessly positive about the state of your workload, even in the face of tremendous stress, is perhaps the most important baptism for a new consultant. For the best summers, this ability comes naturally. For most of us, the first half of the summer was all about building this type of endurance. And of course, a few people had a hard time with this...they had to think long and hard about whether they wanted to come back to consulting full-time.

 

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