Summer Associate at Boston Consulting Group, Summit, New Jersey; Funding: paid internship
What is your career goal?
Support health care organizations in ensuring equitable health access for all.
What were your duties/responsibilities during your internship?
I worked on two different workstreams during my internship. The first was to create a compendium of insights from industry benchmarks that would inform the pharmaceutical supply chain transformation that my team was carrying out for our client. This supply chain supports vulnerable populations in hard-to-reach communities across continents.
The second workstream was focused on creating quantitative models to quantify and highlight the impact of the changes we were proposing to the client. These models shed light on the impact today and over the next couple of years.
What did you take away from your experience as an intern? What was the value of the internship to you?
There were three major learnings from my summer experience.
- Problem-solving and critical thinking: The major thing here is understanding what the key objective is and taking both a top-down and bottoms-up approach to arrive at the final answer.
- Communication with senior stakeholders: The important thing here is learning to take an insight-first approach to communicating with stakeholders and ensuring your message is clear and structured.
- Collaborative work planning: I learned to create effective work plans that allow me to arrive at the final answer as quickly as possible, and to ensure quick and regular alignment across the team.
What was the most rewarding aspect of your internship? What was the most challenging aspect? The most surprising aspect?
- Most rewarding: The genuine relationships I developed with my case team members.
- Most challenging: The work I did required me to learn and unlearn things really quickly; so getting up to speed with my workstream and understanding the interdependencies with the work of others on the team was challenging at the beginning.
- Most surprising: How much I learned and how much I grew at the end of the 10 weeks.
How did your first year at YSPH prepare you for this internship?
My first year at YSPH gave me three things: Firstly, a foundational understanding of how to approach complex problems in global health, with a special focus on how marginalized populations view the health care system; secondly, how to carry out quantitative analysis; and finally, how to explain the analysis to my peers in a clear and concise way. All these formed a solid foundation for what I encountered during the internship.
What would you say to a student who’s considering a similar internship?
I would advise them to apply early and start case prep and networking early so that they are ready when the interviews come. Also, to leverage the resources at Yale to help you get prepared for the interviews.