Driving Client Success as a Consulting Intern at Bain

How was your internship? 

As far as the internship goes, we're all called Associate Consultant Interns; there's just one type of internship at Bain, the ACI role. Basically, you get put in as the most junior member on a project team, and you do essentially whatever they want you to do and all you're trying to do is learn. I was staffed on a tech case for a Bay Area software company, and a lot of it was pulling data from the company's data source, putting together slides, making charts, and then just redoing and redoing the same type of work, but just in a different format so that it would tell a different story to the client. 

What did your typical day look like?

I would roll in right about 9:00am (and this is assuming it's a non-travel day), open up all the different slide decks that I need to have prepped for the day, as well as my OneNote. OneNote was super important during the entire internship – I would check the group OneNote and see if there was anything specifically for me. And then I would go in the slide decks that I had made the day prior, and see if there’d been any new sticky notes this morning that I can already take care of and answer any questions. My manager might say “oh, like what timeline exactly is this graph?”, or “are we comparing this data source with that data source”, et cetera. Any easy things that I could answer, I would answer right away from like 9:00 to 9:30am. And then at 9:30, we typically have morning stand up – senior manager brings us all in the room, talks about what he wants to achieve for the day. Then we'll break off; my supervisor will say, “okay, based on what the manager said, I think these three points are your key priorities for the day”. 

And then we'd break off into work time, but typically during the morning, I'd say like 9:00am to 2:00pm, there’s a lot of client meetings for your managers, your senior managers, and your associate partners on the working team. During that time as an intern, especially if you don't have too much on your plate, a lot of the time you’re just expected to learn and sit in on those meetings and understand what's going on. It's just a great learning experience. But then from like 2:00 to – I would say I would leave the office about like 6:30, 7:00pm most days (besides Fridays) – from like 2:00 to 7:00 is all work time. I would say that most of my team would start trickling out about like 6:00, 7:00. Especially the ones with kids, they try to get home pretty early and then log back on at 9:00, 10:00pm and then work pretty late.

When you look back on your internship experience, are there any highlights or favorite memories that stand out to you? 

As far as company-related, we have a Bain offsite. That's where a bunch of us – the most junior members, so ACIs as well as first- and second-year associates as well as some senior associates – we all went to Austin. They rented out a boat and we spent the day on a boat in Lake Travis, and that was probably the highlight of my summer. 

But as far as work goes, one of the biggest things was that my supervisor, Isaac, was super great as a teacher, and he gave me a lot of freedom to just do my work. A big thing was he would trust me significantly when it came to client calls and stuff where I would barge in with like, “oh, I'm seeing these numbers on July 2019, but I'm seeing these numbers on July 2021, what's up with the discrepancy?”; and then he would allow me to really actively participate in some of these client meetings (a lot of the smaller-scale ones, of course). In those meetings, I got my freedom to ask whatever questions that were on my mind. He trusted me significantly, which is great. 

In consulting, you hear about a lot of travel and client meetings. Can you talk a little bit about what that looked like for you?

Bain has a local staffing model. Pretty much all it means is that you don't travel a ton outside of your local area. So for Bain, Texas offices – which are Austin, Houston, Dallas – they don't travel a ton outside of Texas except for, I think Denver, Atlanta, and other parts of the South. But, I actually was fortunate enough to do some travel outside of that area. I went to San Jose for a couple of times just to go work one-on-one with some of the team members at the client site as well as with their engineers and product managers. Typically travel would be Tuesday through Thursday. You'd get on a flight Tuesday morning, and at 9:00am you're already at the client site; then you work like 9:00am to 9:00pm – Tuesday, Wednesday – and then head out Thursday.

Moving from the role to the company a little bit, can you talk about what the company culture was like? For students who might be considering Bain, are there any things they should know about the company?

One of the big things that they say about Bain, and specifically their place in MBB, is that they have a bit of a fratty culture, and I wouldn't say that's entirely incorrect. I would say that it's very, very work-hard play-hard, especially within my team and the more junior members on the team. During the work day, they are so locked in. But on the weekends, we're going out, we're having fun – a lot of social activities right when work ends. 

Honestly, one of the biggest things that surprised me was almost how casual it was at times. During client meetings, obviously incredibly, incredibly professional. But while we're working, you can just talk to your manager and your senior manager, and you don't have to be super serious about it – you can be very casual, conversational, and you don't have to be talking purely professional with your senior leadership on the team. Everyone’s super approachable.

Moving to the industry as a whole, can you talk about what drew you into consulting, and anything that might help students decide if this is something that they want to pursue as well?

As far as what drew me into consulting, in college my freshman year, there was a senior in my scholarship program who was working at Bain and he just told me about consulting and the role as a whole. I think one of the biggest things that he highlighted was, they say that a year in consulting is three years in industry and you really do learn a ton. And I think that's what really stuck out to me because I enjoy learning and I enjoy a fast-paced work environment. Like day one I'm put on a project – I'm just handed a huge pile of slides and I'm just expected to really get to understand the information as soon as possible, sitting in some of these client meetings, and then day two is starting to do client work, which is a really, really fast-paced environment. But I really enjoy that kind of quick learning and then quick work as well. I don't really like walls in my work for the time being. 

On that note, in terms of preparing for the internship – that kind of fast-paced environment and consulting work – are there any organizations, activities, or classes that you were involved with at SMU that you feel like prepared you well for the experience?

I wasn't part of any of the main consulting clubs on campus, but I was part of Collegiate Consulting Academy. It's almost like a semester-long class that you have to apply to in the fall of your sophomore or your junior year, and then you participate in that class your spring. It's bi-weekly meetings, and basically you get introduced to consulting recruiting, the whole consulting landscape, and which types of companies are involved in it, as well as the case interview and behavioral interviews and getting all the intro reps you need to prep for those interviews. I would say that I strongly recommend CCA.

As far as recruiting goes, I think the big thing is just practice. People say you need at least like 30-40 live cases before you really get good at it. I met interns with me who said that they barely prepped and just kind of winged them and I thought that was extremely surprising considering I practiced all summer for it. I think to each their own, but in my opinion, consulting cases can be really tricky. But once you've practiced and gone through like 20 or 30 you really get the rhythm of it. The approaches get pretty similar and you can really start to visualize your consulting buckets as you go through your case interviews, and as they're reading the script you should already know what approach you want to take with it.