After finishing her first year at Booth, Brittany Essiaw (Booth, ‘21) spent her MBA Internship as a Summer Associate at Bain & Company. During this virtual experience, Essiaw got to work on an operating model redesign while getting a chance to get to know the storied Bain Culture. In this interview, Essiaw talks about her summer experience, what stood out to her about the Bain culture, and her advice to MBA students interested in management consulting internships.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship, and what kind of case/project did you work on?
This summer, I interned with Bain & Company as a Summer Associate Consultant. I worked on an operating model redesign project for a large aerospace company. My workstream focused on change management and communications to ensure that the organization and all affected employees understood the implications of the operating model changes and were well-prepared to make the required changes as a result.
MBASchooled: What were the most important skills you needed to use this summer?
I primarily leveraged communication skills, analytical skills, and presentation skills. As a consultant, you are constantly communicating findings, requests, statuses, etc. to your teams and to clients, and I consistently found myself leveraging my communication skills to adequately summarize and share important information in impactful emails, presentations and meetings.
Additionally, I relied heavily on my analytical skills. While this project was not extremely quantitative, I often had to interpret client information and analyze large quantities of information in order to summarize the key operating model changes and identify the necessary change enablers and communications required to support the changes. Answers are seldom just laid out for you, so a lot of analysis is required to arrive at the best answer. Lastly, I created many presentations that required me to understand the underlying message that I was trying to convey, and summarize the most significant details that would relay that message. Creating slides seems pretty straightforward, but presenting information in a concise (and visually appealing) manner requires a great deal of thought.
MBASchooled: What was the highlight of your internship?
While I had several highlights, one that sticks out the most was Bain’s approach to Juneteenth. My internship began right in the midst of social justice protests following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor among others, and the resurgence of conversations around the significance of Black lives. Rather than proceeding with business as usual, Bain immediately issued statements to its employees, speaking out against racial injustice and taking a stance on the importance of Black lives.
Specifically, the lead Partner in the DC office reached out to me even before the internship began to offer me the space to talk about (or not talk about) my sentiments, concerns, and ask any questions about Bain’s approach to social justice. He also encouraged me to feel free to speak up if I had any thoughts or suggestions for ways that Bain could be more supportive. To further these conversations, Bain made Juneteenth a mandatory day of learning for its employees. Black employees were given the option to take the day off given the heavy burdens created by the prior weeks, but all employees were encouraged to participate.
The day of learning included office-specific small-group discussions about race, equality, current events, and personal experiences. It also included regional discussions, interviews with Black employees, and a sharing of Bain’s commitment to diversity in the coming years. This time served as the highlight of my internship because I have never worked for an organization that has been so outwardly vocal about these issues and about its own need to enhance its diversity and support its Black employees. For all of this to take place in my first couple of weeks as an intern, it made me feel like I was exactly where I needed to be.
MBASchooled: Bain is known for its strong company culture. What stuck out to you about it?
Bain’s culture is what stuck out to me when I first started recruiting, and I think this culture is best defined by the common phrase “A Bainie never lets another Bainie fail.” The thing I immediately realized this summer is that people at Bain are just genuinely kind, good people. They are brilliant and always focused on delivering excellent results to their clients. But at the end of the day, they genuinely care about the people that they work with. I was somewhat intimidated going into my internship because I knew the caliber of Bain employees, and I knew that expectations would be high.
What I was not prepared for was the extent to which my case team and even those I did not work with were willing to help me be successful. People at Bain are so easy to get along with, they have other passions outside of case work, and they genuinely want those around them to feel fulfilled. Supporting one another is embedded in the Bain DNA, and while I felt connected to the people during recruiting, my colleagues were the best part of my internship. Bain is defined by excellent results delivery and always driving towards the answer, but the firm is also extremely flexible, welcoming, and supportive. I knew that my team and those I interacted with would never let me fail.
MBASchooled: What was it like to experience consulting and client work virtually?
Given that consulting so largely relies on teamwork and client interaction, the virtual environment was quite different. However, tools like Zoom and WebEx helped to alleviate some of these challenges. If anything, the virtual environment required me to be more intentional about setting up time with my clients and with my team in order to help foster those relationships.
From a work perspective, the virtual nature did not much impact the actual work that we were doing. It may have meant additional calls with my team to touch base or more frequent touchpoints with the client, but I still used the same analytical, communication, and problem-solving skills that I would have employed had we been in person.
MBASchooled: What was it like to build relationships virtually? What helped?
Building relationships virtually is certainly harder than in person. There is something about working in the same space, having meals together or even walking from office to office that really helps to foster relationship-building. However, Bain did a great job of engaging the summer interns.
My calendar was often filled up with chats with consultants of all levels, Partners, Diversity leads, etc. People were so proactive in reaching out to me, that it took some of the pressure off when trying to get to know people virtually. From there, I felt comfortable reaching back out to have simple chats throughout the course of the internship. In general, the informal virtual conversations and lunches, happy hours, and activities that were built into the internship were really helpful.
MBASchooled: What was a challenge that you had to overcome or work through?
Although I continue to work on developing my Excel capabilities, this was still an area of weakness as I entered my internship. I was asked to put together a few summary tables consolidating a large amount of data, and while I’ve done some work in Excel, the ask was still beyond my typical skillset.
To overcome this challenge, I realized how important it is to leverage teammates, particularly the Associate Consultants (ACs) who are newer to the firm. Despite being only months out of undergrad, the ACs are extremely knowledgeable and really serve as a safe sounding board to ask questions. The AC on my team was crucial in helping me expand my Excel skills and general Bain knowledge during the summer. Developing this relationship of knowledge sharing with our team’s AC helped me become more comfortable with leveraging every teammate, regardless of level.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for other MBA students who are interested in internships in management consulting?
Take the time to get to know the companies you are pursuing. While recruiting can feel like the firms are doing all the evaluating, it is just as important for you to determine if the firms are a good fit for you. Consulting firms may look the same on paper and do similar work, but each firm has its own unique culture. It is worthwhile to make sure that the people, culture, and ways of working align with your own priorities. Additionally, while preparing for case interviews is absolutely critical, it is also important to prepare for the fit interviews.
This requires taking the time to get to know yourself, your goals, and why consulting and specific firms are the right fit for you. I found this to be essential in my deciding to even pursue consulting, and taking the time to really ask myself the tough questions helped me validate that consulting was for me once I was actually experiencing it in the internship.