Melanie Wyld: The Internship Gamble

My internship was in San Francisco, but I spent my summer in the heady heat of Las Vegas and then the sweet (relative) cool of Seattle. Yep, I was in consulting and I was on the road.

The first thing that surprised me about consulting was the speed with which everything happens. I was staffed on a project in Las Vegas on my first day and the next morning I was on an "it's-still-dark-outside" early flight to Sin City. I arrived at the team room after everyone else and realized that my first challenge for the day would be to find somewhere to sit. We were in a tiny conference room which seemed to be built directly around a wooden table. There was little room to move, especially when it was filled with seven people and their whirring laptops. I finally found a place to perch but alas was lacking an Internet connection . . . my first experience in what was to become a summerlong quest for connectivity.

I found working in Vegas to be slightly surreal. As I strode through the lobby of my hotel (which took about 10 minutes it was so large), gamblers and their bourbons surrounding me at all times of the day or night, overwhelmed by the cacophony of rings, dings, and bellows that are ever-present in a casino, I felt awkward and out of place dressed in a suit, lugging a laptop and feeling those slight stress pangs that have always accompanied me on my first few weeks of a job.

Where I did not feel awkward and out of place was in the team room. I realized pretty quickly that I loved working in that environment. I mean I loved it. This was by no means assured, as I have spent the last five years in my own space doing a job which required little in the way of constant interaction with others. I was slightly nervous about all the togetherness that comes with the territory in consulting. But it was fantastic. There was witty banter to pass the time, real kindness in helping me learn and great conversations at lunch. It was a phenomenal experience. The people I got to work with were incredible. They were interesting, smart, caring, client-focused, learning-oriented and fun. As a team, they really were everything that I could have hoped for, everything that I felt had been pitched to me and more from the team leader down to the analyst.

While I loved the team, I was concerned that the work I was doing wasn't representative of the kind of work typically done by big consulting companies. I spent most of my time creating pivot tables with Excel rather than whipping up slides on PowerPoint, and the nature of the project meant that there wasn't really a place for the meaty brainstorming sessions I had been looking forward to.

The mere hint of this to someone led to a speedy change and my weekly flights to Vegas were replaced with journeys to Seattle. What impressed me about this was how much the company was focused on my experience — and every intern's — over the summer. I really got the feeling that they wanted us to fully know what it would be like to work as a consultant and would do what they could to make sure that happened.

Seattle was a completely different experience, except for Internet connectivity — I still didn't have that. The team was smaller and the nature of the work meant people were in and out of the team room constantly. Because of this, the team didn't feel as cohesive as the Vegas team felt. The work was much more representative of traditional consulting work, though, so I got to learn how to communicate ideas through PowerPoint and to participate in brainstorming sessions. Sitting in a brainstorming session and trying to solve a problem as a group is absolutely the most fun I have ever had while getting paid. It was truly amazing and fun and challenging and rewarding and basically just my ideal work experience. (Working with PowerPoint less so.)

I feel like I had a very representative experience in consulting, but I believe that it takes two projects to get that. I feel like I learned a lot about working in consulting, including that no two projects are ever alike and no one project has everything — the team, the partner, the project, the client, the travel — so you piece it all together as best you can.

Consulting is a great industry to do your internship in — everyone has an MBA and so has a fair idea of what you do and don't know, you get to work on business issues that can be similar to the kinds of issues you face in cases at school, and it's at once more practical than school and yet still slightly removed so it offers a great vantage point to think about industries.