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Summer Internship Series: EY-Parthenon

Brandon Quinn is an MBA2 specializing in Strategy and Business Analytics. Prior to Stern, Brandon worked in financial regulation where he examined some of the largest US brokerage firms. At Stern, Brandon serves as a Graduate Ambassador, Career Fellow, VP of Admissions for the Management Consulting Association (MCA) and VP of Marketing for the Business Analytics Club (BAC). 

Consulting recruiting is a time consuming process that begins as soon as you step on campus to start the MBA program – or in a pandemic, as soon as you log into Zoom for that first class. Students attend various corporate presentations, coffee chats, and case workshops to learn about the different firms and to prepare for the case interviews. We put in all this effort to land a coveted consulting internship, which will hopefully turn into a full-time post-graduation offer. 

I spent my summer at EY-Parthenon in their strategy summer consultant program. I was assigned to the New York office, but the internship was almost entirely virtual. There were a few days I decided to go into the office to see where I would be working, to meet some colleagues face-to-face, and to attend some in-person happy hour events. 

The first week of the program was comprised of various training sessions to help us get accustomed to the firm, learn about the different types of projects, and build our consulting toolkit. After the first week of training, all the interns (including me) were eager to find out which consulting project we would be working on to start the summer. I was assigned to a working capital engagement at a large cosmetic company. Coming from a finance background, the cosmetics industry was a bit foreign to me, but this is what excites me about consulting. Consultants solve some of the most complex problems at some of the largest corporations and work across various industries that might initially seem foreign to them. 

A typical day as an intern on a project consisted of a daily check-in call with the team where we laid out all our objectives for that day. After this call, we split into our workstreams to accomplish the goals for the day; I spent time assessing and prioritizing new markets for expanding one of the client’s programs globally. There was also a daily call with the client where we would present recommendations and make sure everyone was aligned. 

In addition to the real-world project assignment, interns were put into case teams where we worked on two mock projects with EYP practitioners as coaches. This was a great experience to get a flavor of the different types of projects offered at EYP—this also aided in building comradery among us interns and helped us feel more engaged and connected in the virtual environment. The work was challenging and EYP offered an abundance of support through functional training, mentorship, coaches, and sector spotlights. Overall, this was an incredible experience and made the time-consuming recruiting process well worth it!

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Summer Internship Series: Morgan Stanley

Kushal Mehta is a current MBA2 at NYU Stern. Prior to Stern, he spent 6 years in the Bay Area where he worked at Deloitte in the Audit practice and at Uber in an accounting function. This summer, Kushal interned within Morgan Stanley’s Investment Banking Division as part of their Technology group based in New York City. He holds a Bachelors of Commerce from the University of Toronto.

How intense is Investment Banking? How competitive is recruiting for IB? What do bankers do exactly? After completing my summer internship at Morgan Stanley, I hope I can shed some light onto the questions above –  questions that were on top of my mind as an applicant to NYU Stern, and as a MBA1 during recruiting.

Let’s start with recruiting. Make no bones about it – recruiting for IB is not easy. But, with the right attitude and preparation, you will set yourself up for success. There are 2 key factors to keep in mind: 

  • First, stay organized. IB recruiting is networking heavy, and there will be countless interactions you have with each bank during the process. From managing your calendar, to taking notes post-coffee chats, to sending thank you e-mails – find a method that helps you stay organized through this process.
  • Second, do not overlook coffee chats. Many coffee chats (especially early on) may seem casual and non-judgmental, but every interaction with the bank is an opportunity for them to assess whether you are a right fit for them and vice versa. Doing well in these coffee chats is critical to landing interview invites and job offers! 

I spent my summer within Morgan Stanley’s Technology group based in New York. Under “normal” circumstances (pre-COVID), MS operates a Generalist Pool model, where all Summer Associates rotate through 2 or 3 different groups of their choice over the course of 10 weeks. Since our internship was mostly virtual, we were placed directly into our top-choice group. Our 10 weeks had 4.5 weeks of training and 5.5 weeks of “on-desk” time (i.e. real work). 

When we “hit the desk” in July, each of the interns within the Tech East group was placed on 3 live deals. The best part about this was that every task that I worked on delivered immediate value for my team and the client. There was no business development work or “summer projects.”

Overall, I worked on 1 buy-side process, 1 sell-side process and 2 equity financing deals. It was fascinating to see the different ways in which investment banks deliver value for their clients. For example, we worked with the founders of an 8-year-old startup to help translate their vision into an enticing and attractive pitch for potential investors. In contrast, we also worked with a large public company and its C-Suite team, which comprised of seasoned executives with 20+ years of experience. Getting to work with founders and veteran executives as a junior banker is an experience that is unparalleled and was one of the highlights of my internship. 

If you have your eyes set on recruiting for IB, go all in. With the right effort and dedication, nothing is out of reach. Feel free to send me a note out if there are any questions, always happy to help – kushal.mehta@stern.nyu.edu!

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Summer Internship Series: Amazon

Gordon Fan is an MBA2 specializing in marketing and brand management. Prior to Stern, he worked in Cartier’s 5th Ave Mansion Client Experience Team and Retail Innovation Lab, and also served in the Taiwan Military Coast Guard as an event/graphic designer. At Stern, he serves as the Co-President of Luxury Retail Club and President of NYU Buddhism Club. He holds a BFA in Stage Design from NYU Tisch. He loves painting Buddhas and making dance reels!

This summer, I had the opportunity to choose a hybrid-in person option for my Amazon Retail Leadership Development Program Internship! My role was Vendor Manager in the Kitchen Retail Team (Hot Beverages). My summer project was to manage and improve sales, profitability, and customer experience for four high-priced coffee machine vendors: De’Longhi, Jura, Technivorm Moccamaster, and Bunn. I was also responsible for onboarding a new luxury espresso brand, providing a recommended strategy and roadmap to attract luxury kitchen brands, and updating the vendor-facing pitch deck for new potential brands.

A typical day would be filled with weekly check-in meetings with my vendors. In meetings, we would discuss areas of improvement. The main goal for all my vendors was trying to secure ample inventory for Q4 and holiday shopping season. This was challenging, as port congestion issues and COVID-19 outbreaks delayed shipping for products. We had to find the right balance between our forecasted amounts, how much our fulfillment centers can take and how much allocation vendors can give to us. There were a lot of back and forth negotiations.

I would also recommend marketing options that can help brands have more discoverability and visibility on the storefront webpage. Some things to look at weekly were the number of products that were out of stock, gross merchandise sales, NetPPM, bottom line profit margins, and vendor’s confirmation rates. With a vast number of teams in Amazon, you have to know the right people to ask and also depend on internal wikis, pitch decks, and info docs. Finding a strategy also required a lot of information gathering – similar solutions that I would come up with for my strategy might have been started or in the process of being implemented. So it was eye-opening to interview a lot of people from different groups and understand the experiments and research they did to implement new products. My strategy was a combination of creating a separate UX subpage between regular and high-priced kitchen products, adding a pre-sale live chat function for users and refining internal materials for vendor outreach.

At Amazon, we were not required to go to the office, and you could tell very fast that Amazon relies on working virtually. As long as you have your laptop and a double screen, you are all set. Everything is communicated by email, Slack, and Chime (Amazon internal Zoom tool). During the summer, I would frequent the office twice a week either to socialize with other interns and colleagues, enjoy a walk at the Spheres (Amazon Greenhouse Planetarium), or do some painting at the Expressions Lab (art classroom open to all employees to destress).

As a New Yorker, moving from NYC to Seattle for 3 months was quite an experience. Although work was stressful and busy mostly, I was grateful to experience the nature that Seattle has to offer, meet other Sternies at Amazon, and meet other MBA interns! It was fantastic to get to know other interns from other MBA schools, learn about their school’s cultures and the things they’re working on in their team at Amazon. The highlight of my internship was making new friendships and visiting the Olympic and Mount Rainier National Park. I’m glad I made the trip for an amazing Seattle summer!

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Summer Internship Series: ZS Associates

Arthur Heitz is an MBA2 specializing in Strategy and Entertainment, Media and Technology. In addition to serving as a Graduate Ambassador, he is also a VP of Academics and Case Competitions for the Entertainment, Media and Sports Association (EMSA) and a Teaching Fellow for Pr. Matthew Lee’s core Strategy. Arthur was born in Dayton, OH and graduated with a BA from Boston College in 2013. He spent the majority of his career pre-MBA in client services roles at GLG. 

Most choose to pursue their MBA to progress in their career, but getting into business school can feel like a job all in of itself. You study for the GMAT, research schools, speak to alumni, attend presentations, update your resume, write essays and interview all in the hope you end up at a school that’s right for you. Then, what feels like immediately, you get to school and you reenact that process ALL OVER AGAIN: you recruit. You choose your industry(s) of interest, research firms, network, update your resume (even more), and interview all while taking in your class work. All told, upon eventually receiving an offer, it occurred to me I had spent nearly two whole years of my life preparing to become a consultant. I had spent so much time working to get the job, though, that I spent precious little time thinking about the job itself. And with the approach of my internship, it was time, I realized with a mixture of exhilaration and anxiety, to actually consult. Eager, excited and with undeniable nerves, I approached the first week of my internship this summer with a question I dared not ask out loud: So what does a consultant actually do?

Turns out, they do a lot of things. First and foremost, they do what their clients ask. Consulting is ultimately a service business so interacting with and advising clients is required. These are professionals, mind you, whom if they are not former consultants themselves have built a life in their industry or company. This makes learning as much as possible about your clients and their projects essential, both to instill confidence and reassure your client that they are in capable hands. You obviously cannot become an expert overnight, but consultants have a pithy phrase that describes the bar to which you must strive: “know enough to be dangerous.” Furthermore, it turns out those hours (read: days) ((read: weeks)) you spent practicing case studies for consulting interviews actually come in handy. Consulting is also about assessing situations in the moment and problem-solving on the fly. That could mean practicing effective time management, working in Excel or Powerpoint, or figuring out the story being told by a set of data. It could even mean navigating the mine-filled landscape of scheduling a meeting among stakeholders who have a total of zero common availability in a given week. Some problems take days to solve, others may take just minutes. Each day is invariably different in consulting, which can be exhilarating or harrowing, depending on the day.

Reading this, you may think I have reached a place of comfort in the role. More comfortable than when I started, certainly, but I still have a long way to go. Luckily, I work for an organization that understands my plight and is dedicated to supporting me. I was fortunate and humbled to receive an offer to intern at ZS Associates, a firm that works across industries but specializes in consulting for healthcare clients. Despite this focus, they work on as wide a breadth of project types as you would expect to encounter at other leading firms. They understand you are an intern, so try not to push you directly into the deep end. You’re brought onboard for a reason, though, and are given the opportunity to contribute directly to live project work. To help, ZS provides you with resources in the form of trainings, coaches and peer-buddies to help you wade slowly but surely into the oceanic waters of consulting. I’m learning that becoming a great consultant does not happen overnight, so am constantly reminding myself that improvement can come but one day at a time.

Consulting is, on one hand, a natural progression of everything I’ve learned during my career and at school. But on the other, it can be really, really hard. You could say something similar about business school, by the way. Ultimately, like getting into school or recruiting, I see it as another obstacle to overcome, another problem to solve. With some help, determination, and maybe a little bit of luck, I may just yet learn enough to be dangerous.

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How Sternies Helped Me Prepare for Virtual Recruiting

Rizwana Iqbal is a current MBA2 at Stern. Prior to Stern, she was woring with the Government of India to develop the national healthcare innovation commercialization ecosystem. She is a technology enthusiast by profession and singer by heart. Bookworm, fitness freak, self-confessed foodie (and cook!). An explorer and incurable dreamer!

 

 

In my previous blog post, I had written about securing my summer internship through SternWorks. I knew I would have to recruit for a full-time job in the summer, through the pandemic. A lot of companies had stopped recruiting and many outright refused to hire international students. So, I knew I would have to bring my A-game for every coffee chat and interview. There was no place for the second best. However, most of the networking for consulting opportunities actually happens when applying for an internship. I did not know that. So, I was stumped. I had to re-energize my skeleton network and reach out to a few people with whom I had connected quite well during the internship process last fall. I knew this was not going to be enough. I had to hustle. I reconnected, expressed my interests, but most importantly, I did not pressure myself to impress anyone.

To keep my sanity while dealing with the stress of recruiting during the pandemic and being an older candidate, I promised myself that every day I just would keep one foot in front of the other, (ie, network, apply and give my best when called for interviews) but be detached from results. I chose to believe that the job where I would be happy would find me in due time. So, in the meantime, I just had to keep my head down and do what I needed to do, without worrying about the outcome.

Then, one fine day, I got an interview invite for a team, a role and an office that was my top priority. Sternies rallied behind me. Five of my fellow Sternies would take 2-3 hours out of their schedules per week for 4-5 weeks continuously to coach me, so I could succeed. They prepped and prepared me while constantly reminding me that I had a strong personality and should bring forth my humorous side. They gave me the confidence that when I interviewed with the firm, I was not afraid of showing my true self and it also allowed me to be confident. Consequently, when I received the final offer from the firm, I realized that my success was not the mere culmination of my efforts, but so much more. There is no alternative to hard work, but hard work alone is not enough for achieving your goals. Having the right people around you, who support you and to bring out your best self, is critical to one achieving his/her goals. Recruiting through the pandemic made me feel eternally grateful for being a part of the Stern community.

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Launching the Stern Venture Thesis

Sam Greene is an MBA2 specializing in finance, business analytics and strategy.  At Stern, he serves as a VP of Mentorship with the Private Equity & Venture Capital Club and VP of Communications with the Entrepreneurship & Start-Up Association in addition to other leadership roles on campus. Sam graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 with a Bachelor’s in Molecular and Cell Biology.

In my previous blog post, I wrote about failing to secure a summer internship in the fall recruiting process in the first-year of the MBA. I was devastated, but judging a process by an outcome destroys meaning in the process itself.  Failing to secure an internship pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to learn a valuable lesson: while Stern provides structure and access to opportunities, our own individual successes are our own personal responsibilities. 

One of the single most important skills I practiced throughout the MBA is how to network effectively. I think the old adage that you never get what you do not ask for rings particularly true for me. It was only through networking and asking for help that I won the opportunity that made the rest of my internship experience possible. Hustle matters, it is alive and well, and go-getters who spend time learning about others’ careers are better positioned to keep growing in their own careers. It’s this desire to continuously learn and keep growing that informs my goals as a Vice President (VP) on the board of the Private Equity and Venture Capital (PEVC).

In my role as a VP I manage the day-to-day execution of the venture capital recruiting track at NYU Stern. In only its second year, the VC recruiting track seeks to prepare students for careers in venture capital.  In years past, the person in my role was tasked with running a mentorship program that pairs MBA students with VC alumni to help and students network there way into internships. In theory, the program should have helped drive performance in recruiting statistics but in practice, this did not happen. Very few, if any students, converted their mentor-mentee relationships into summer internships in venture capital. If we are measuring the program’s success by the number of students that participated in the program and subsequently interned in venture capital the following summer, the program was a failure. But at least it failed fast and the experience taught us how to build something better!

In the spring, while transitioning into the VP role, I hopped on calls to distill feedback from the ten VCs and the ten students that participated in the mentorship program. I learned something very interesting. Almost all the VCs and students independently identified the same problem with the program: there was not a clear ‘ask’ for either the mentors or the mentees. VC mentors, while excited to help, were not clear on the purpose of the program. MBA students, while eager to learn, did not know where to start in their recruiting process. In a way, the relationship was a non-starter; there was no value-creating deliverable driving the process forward. In order to build a successful VC career track we needed to be clear on the mission and purpose of the program: to best prepare students to recruit, interview and secure Venture Capital internships.

I went back to the drawing board after my summer internship and started chatting with classmates to understand the DNA of the VC recruiting process better. I learned that one of the drivers for a successful recruiting process is delivering a well-researched investment thesis to funds. Chain, my classmate and a first-year MBA, coincidentally, had developed a program to help him and some classmates recruit for VC the previous fall. His program paired four MBA students with four VCs to develop investment theses over the course of an academic year. In the end, two students secured internships in VC, one already signed for an internship in Investment Banking and the other recruited for start-ups. A 50% success rate among the students participating in the program.

In partnership with Chain, we launched the Stern Venture Thesis program four months ago. Stern Venture Thesis was a synthesis of the legacy mentorship program inherited by PEVC and the thesis program that Chain created from 0 to 1. Chain’s thesis program succeeds in defining a clear ‘ask,’ an investment thesis produced in April at the end of the first-year of the MBA program. The mentorship program brings size and scope, with over a hundred alumni in the network and over fifty actively engaging with the club. I spent the end of the summer and beginning of the fall growing the supply by marketing the program to the alumni in the mentorship network. Our marketing effort yielded fourteen interested VCs by the time applications for the program launched in early October. On the demand side, word-of-mouth and digital marketing on CampusGroups drove over 50 students to attend our kick-off event in October. From the 50 students who attended, 17 applied to the program and 7 were selected to participate based on their interviews and interest in recruiting for venture capital. As of now, the MBAs are paired with thesis advisors at leading funds including Greylock, Company and 500startups based on mutual interests in topics. Our topics this year range from IoT, cybersecurity and developer tools to e-commerce enabled gen-z market-places.

I’m super excited to continue networking with alumni to grow my own network but even more excited about deepening Stern’s connection with its alumni through mutually-beneficial programs that give ownership to students and value to VCs

Looking forward, me and my team will be building out a website to host the final deliverables and clearly lay out a timeline for the program in 2021 – 2022. Aleksija and Alec are transitioning from their roles as AVPs to VPs and beginning to make introductions to alumni in the network. In an effort to strengthen our partnership with the undergraduate program, we are having conversations with the Stern Venture Society, essentially the undergraduate equivalent of the PEVC club, to plan a venture capital competition in the spring and provide more educational programming to both clubs. Lastly, in partnership with ESA, we are planning some VC panels in February to bring back alumni to Stern and partner with affinity clubs such as JSA, AHBBS and SWIB. Exciting things are happening at Stern in VC and I’m excited to be helping shape the future of the club and Stern presence in the venture capital community.

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How the Leadership Fellows Program Helped Me Grow

Ketriel Mendy is an MBA2 at NYU Stern, specializing in Finance and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Prior to Stern, he worked as a Senior Business Analyst at Chewy.com. In Addition, he served in the United States Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer across the Pacific. As a first-generation immigrant, Ketriel is President of the Stern in Africa club. In the summer of 2020, Ketriel worked in the Product Strategy and Merchandising group at Allbirds. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Tulane University. 

The first time that I heard that I should do Leadership Fellows was in a conversation with MBA2 who was my teaching fellow as talked through an issue with my peers. She told me that Leadership Fellows was the sort of opportunity that I “might be into”. She was absolutely right. Leadership Fellows has been the forum I was looking for in terms of how to dig in deep with people in terms of how to cultivate ourselves as individuals, members of society, and ultimately, leaders. I can say without reservation that this is the most consequential thing that I believe that I’m doing in my second year. 

Over the course of 2020, uncertainty, ambiguity, and leadership are weighing on us daily as we navigate a global pandemic, social turmoil, shifting economic and political fortunes, and a myriad of personal challenges. Leadership Fellows has helped my formulate my values into a plan of attack and a means to have impact beyond the balance sheet.

This is especially meaningful for me because you’re not doing it alone. My cohort, Tribeca, is filled with another dozen humans that this process is just as important to. What’s been fascinating for me is reflecting on my own journey and contrasting that with others and seeing the universal themes that appear. We all have worries. We all have concerns about our impact in the future of the world. Even in the domains where we are judged as excellent by others, we still have our own doubts. Being able to speak openly and candidly about the things that we are unsure about allows you to examine yourself an entirely new light. In this year where we cannot responsibly see the world as we might in a traditional times, focusing on personal development has provided a rich vein of inquiry to mine. 

When I was making my decisions about what I wanted to be exposed to in order to evolve as a leader, I couldn’t have designed a better programming in a lab. Together with my cohort, I’m excited about the journey of development through the next of the year and what we’ll be able to learn about ourselves and each other.  I can’t wait to get to work.

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My Experience in the Leadership Fellows Program

Emily Glaser is an MBA2 at NYU Stern. Prior to Stern, she spent four years at Restaurant Brands International in communications and marketing for the Burger King brand. At Stern, Emily serves on Student Government and the Graduate Marketing Association. She loves dogs, musical theater, and hiking.

 

 

 

One of the things that drew me to Stern for my MBA was the school’s focus on EQ + IQ. Stern looks to not only educate intellectually exceptional students, but to also challenge your thinking and develop you personally. Stern is looking to produce leaders who are not only smart, but able to adapt to and understand change. I loved the idea of a school that focused on the whole person and their impact on others, rather than solely their achievements on paper.

A great example of this focus is the Leadership Fellows program. Leadership Fellows is a selective yearlong mentorship program, which aims to develop both personal and professional skills through reflection and storytelling activities, one-on-one coaching sessions, and small-cohort roundtable discussions. We meet as a group monthly to go over our most recent reflections and share our life stories – we share experiences of loss, hardship, achievement and growth. We share where we want to go and who we want to be in the future, as well as how we plan to get there. Through the Leadership Fellows program, we work to improve our self-awareness and active listening skills, and to develop actionable plans for achieving our personal goals. It’s an extremely vulnerable but enriching environment where we can both challenge and encourage each other constantly.

One of the best aspects of the program is the small cohorts we’re assigned to for the duration of the year – each is comprised of individuals from highly diverse personal and professional backgrounds, so we benefit from the wisdom of others with vastly different experiences from our own. My cohort of 12 students consists of a former teacher, a future lawyer, a first-generation college student, several international students, a part-time Langone student, marketers, consultants, and of course others. Because we’re all so different, we’re able to ask each other questions and offer perspectives we may not have otherwise considered. We develop deep relationships and foster incredible trust through our activities, an ultimately learn and grow together. 

Another key benefit of the Leadership Fellows program is our monthly meetings with current and former changemakers across many different industries; we have intimate access to business leaders who have seen it all and can now tell us about what they’ve learned along the way. This fall, we’ve had the pleasure to meet with the interim CEO of Patagonia as well as the former CEO of Chase Card Services, both of whom led their organizations through times of immense change and needed to inspire others to achieve big goals. Our speakers talk to us about risks they’ve taken, decisions they’ve had to make, and how they’ve dealt with both successes and failures throughout their careers. No question is off the table when we meet with these amazing individuals. 

Through these deep conversations and ongoing discussions of goals and growth my cohort has become not just a random group of students, but a family of leaders who can call on each other throughout our careers as we continue to learn and grow. Participating in Leadership Fellows has given me the ability to share my past, illustrate my future, and develop the leadership tools and skills to make it a reality.

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Course Spotlight: Tech Innovation Strategy

Michael Graf is an MBA2 who spent his summer internship at Facebook. Prior to Stern, he worked at J.P. Morgan Chase as a Reputation Risk Associate. He serves as Co-President of OutClass, an Orientation Leader, a Leadership Fellow, and a Graduate Ambassador. Michael is working towards specializations in Strategy and Leadership & Change Management. He enjoys crossword puzzles, snowboarding, and reading historical fiction.

This fall, I finally had the opportunity to take one of my favorite classes at Stern, Technology Innovation Strategy. I had been looking forward to learning from Professor Melissa Schilling since I made the bold decision to pursue my post-MBA career in Big Tech. As a career switcher from the financial services industry, I wanted to add new skills to my toolkit to better understand and contribute to the fast-paced changes in the tech sector. I was specifically interested in Professor Schilling’s lectures after I heard her speak on NPR about lessons we can learn from the world’s most famous innovators, from Elon Musk to Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. 

Technology Innovation Strategy is a half-semester class that flies by in six short weeks, so I knew I had to make the most of each three-hour session. Our first class focused on sources of innovation, where we explored some of the serial innovators that Professor Schilling spoke about on NPR. I was excited and surprised to learn that while we aren’t all born with genius, we can make use of certain techniques and management practices to cultivate innovation. Teams that can lower the price of failure when brainstorming ideas and providing autonomy to independent contributors – and even a dose of caffeine – can facilitate creativity and allow us to engage in unstructured thinking. I was inspired to make some small changes in my routine, like setting aside a half hour before tackling a group project to go for a walk to set the stage for associative thinking, and jotted down the big takeaways to carry with me when I return to work full time. 

A later class on technology platforms and dominant designs helped me think critically about decisions made by Facebook’s Gaming team, who I had the opportunity to work with during my summer internship. I learned that certain industries – especially in the technology space, like video games – benefit from a dominant design, a standard that defines the majority of the products in the marketplace. Dominant designs exist because they exhibit increasing returns to adoption, meaning the more a technology is adopted, the more valuable it becomes. In the video game industry, the more users who adopt a certain system, like Nintendo or Xbox, the more likely it is the other users will also adopt that platform. I began to understand why the team spent so much time trying to attract the best and most popular streamers to the platform and investing time in designing tools to incentivize streaming on Facebook, rather than a competitor. The value of Facebook Gaming to users increases with the number of streamers and ultimately the number of other viewers as well. Facebook’s Gaming team thoughtfully went to great lengths to advertise, through headline placement on its website, when a new high-profile streamer had agreed to use the platform. This way, users perceived growth in others adopting the platform, which actually led to increases in adoption.

Not only do I now feel well equipped to understand the strategies behind technology development, but I also feel confident in my ability to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of tech collaboration, deployment and innovation when I return to Facebook as a full-time employee. Professor Schilling’s class equipped me with an academic framework for thoughtfully dissecting the short- and long-term consequences of choosing innovation projects, working quickly or methodically towards a new technology with a partner organization, and even how best to license or trademark advancements. These skills have set me up for success for a career in Big Tech and I can’t wait to put them to use!

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What It’s Like to Experience Virtual Recruitment for Consulting

Lanesha Williams is an MBA2 specializing in digital strategy and marketing. Prior to Stern, she worked within Accenture’s federal practice as a technology consulting analyst, helping different government agencies implement and maintain technology systems. At Stern, she serves as the VP of Treks for the Association of Hispanic and Black Business Students. Lanesha graduated from Howard University in 2015 with a B.B.A. in Supply Chain Management.

2020 has been quite an interesting year to be a business school student.  During the spring semester of my first year, things began to take a turn.  We moved to online classes, social events were canceled, and some companies decided to scale back their internship programs.  I was fortunate to have a full internship experience this summer.  Although my experience was completely virtual, I was able to be placed on a retail project at a digital consulting firm.  I thoroughly enjoyed my summer but decided I wanted to explore other job opportunities that were available.  I knew that the recruiting process would be different in the age of COVID-19, but I was willing to adjust and cast my net to see what I could catch.  

As most people interested in consulting are aware, case interviews are a pivotal part of the recruiting process.  Before the pandemic, we had the opportunity to practice casing in person with our classmates.  We had teams and groups that would practice drills together and participate in mock interviews.  The pandemic didn’t stop the collaborative recruiting environment that Stern fosters.  My classmates and I organized virtual meetups where we could practice casing and run through math problems.  Through the Management Consulting Association, I also received exclusive access and discounts to prep websites.  I was even able to take a Consulting Interview Readiness Assessment, which highlighted my strengths and weaknesses when walking through case interviews.  My classmates and MCA club members extended themselves to ensure that I was prepared for the interview season that was quickly approaching.

The second-year recruiting process is much more expedited when compared to the first-year student process.  Companies were not able to come on campus to host events, but they did host multiple information sessions via Zoom.  Stern alumni were also happy to talk to me about their experiences at various companies I was interested in applying to.  This isn’t behavior that was unique to the pandemic; Sternies are always willing to connect if you reach out to them with questions. 

Once I was done attending virtual info sessions, I applied to the companies that were on my shortlist.  Within a few days, employees from each company reached out to me to set up individual calls to chat about the company as well as help me prep for interviews.  These representatives walked me through how their company would be conducting interviews and made sure I was comfortable with the new set up.  They also answered any outstanding questions I had.  These pre-interview touchpoints really made me feel comfortable and confident going in to interview day.

On interview day, I got up and prepared myself as I would for any other interview, minus putting on real pants.  I did some meditation, put on a dress shirt and blazer, set up my ring light, and reviewed my notes one final time.  Each company I interviewed for included some form of online analysis before moving to one-on-one interviews.  Since I had passed those, I was able to move on to the zoom interview rounds.  The interviews were a lot less stressful than I had anticipated.  Interviewers were forgiving of technical glitches.  Some even fielded distractions from kids or pets.  I did have to talk through my cases a bit more since my interviewer couldn’t see my paperwork, but I had no problem doing so.  I ended the day feeling confident and reassured about the entire process.

Recruiting remotely isn’t ideal, but it’s the world we live in right now.  Both Stern and corporations have done a tremendous job adapting to the changing times.  I’m thankful that I was able to go through the process successful and appreciative of all of the resources I had along the way.