Internship with McKinsey and Company — Apoorv from IIT Bombay

Wildcard Entry for: –  5th August 2012

Name of the intern: –  Apoorv

Institute: –  IIT Bombay

Organization interned with: –  McKinsey and Company

My internship with McKinsey and Co. was amazing. I was asked to read up on stuff initially and was apprehensive of the work I would be actually allotted. My project guide was a senior level manager and his schedule did not permit him to talk much to me but my I had a great friend who encouraged me to learn new things, particularly advanced Excel and Visual Basic. He frequently checked up on me and had also asked other analysts to check up on me, which gave me a feeling that I was a part of the team.

I was initially given a laborious task in which I had to make a prototype for one of Asia’s largest banks and make it as generic as possible. To give one a flavour of the numbers involved, nearly 4,000 excel worksheets had to be created for a single prototype. I was given the task of creating 300 sheets. A week into the project, I suggested a wild idea – ‘Why don’t we code the whole thing?’ My buddy told me that I could do anything in my own time and could take help from him on the same, and so in a week, I made an elementary model which was a huge hit. Lady luck was on my side as during that time, the Global Head of Risk Analytics was in India. He was also pleased with the development on the project and asked my guide to enhance the scope of the project. Thus, from developing a ‘prototype’, I now had to develop a ‘prototype generation tool’ which would be treated as a standard tool for creating future prototypes and I had to develop that in a very tight deadline.

To fire me up, my buddy forwarded an appreciation mail to me from my guide which was not intended for me which said that (I kid you not) ‘This is SUPER AWESOME’ along with some industry jargon which meant that they were considering to actually present all this in its entirety to the client. The text in caps really blew me away along with the sense of pride at the fact that my project could actually be used in an industry!

Despite the tight deadlines, I was able to put through a working model. I couldn’t prepare a presentation and documentation on time for the same, but my guide and buddy overlooked it.

Another great comment which I received was when a line manager asked me, “It’s been 3 weeks, when are you planning on presenting your work to us?” to which another line manager who overheard this, replied, “Have you seen his project? It is completely automated. It doesn’t require a presentation.” All these dialogues kept me working day and night on my project. The final model could dynamically create nearly 2,000 variables for any desired number of statistics.

The icing on the cake was what my guide told me on my last day – ‘Thanks a lot. You have done something which we have been trying to do, or at least we have been thinking of trying to do in the last 2 years. You have put us in the right direction and your project will be used as a template for developing future models for credit risk’. It was an unforgettable moment for me.

I had loads of fun in the company as well and played my fair share of pranks. I wore a coat to the company whereas everyone except the main bosses wore sweaters. As the winter in Gurgaon is quite extreme, I continued to wear a coat and not a sweater. An analyst was to join the office in the second week of my internship and was completely unaware of who I was. I was asked by a team member to pretend to be an associate from Singapore who was heading the team on the prototype development project I was working on (as she didn’t know me and I also wore a coat). The best part about the prank was that I had room to improvise. She had been informed by others that I was the new team head for the project and when I saw her coming over, I took out my phone and acted like I was talking to someone and told her to come back later. People snickered all over the department. The next time she came back, I didn’t give her a chance to speak and started interrogating her about who she was and where she had been all this time. People had formed a small crowd behind her but she was very nervous so she didn’t notice it.

She saw my screen and asked me, “Sir, why are you coding on the project? We are here to do this.” I retorted, “I gave this piece of work to Karan (my guide). That guy couldn’t even write a simple segment of code correctly. Guess I have to do everything around here. No wonder people say that this office is a dead end.” By this time, the whole team had crowded behind her and hearing my comments, they broke into peals of laughter. The analyst who I was interrogating didn’t understand what was happening until I told her that all this was a prank. At first, she got a bit angry but later appreciated my brazen attitude.

I met great people during this internship and had loads of fun. I wish everyone good luck so that they may find the same amount of satisfaction I experienced during my internship.

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