Ananya Shankar Singh - PwC US Advisory

Hello there, I’m Ananya Shankar Singh, a 4th year undergraduate pursuing Civil Engineering (wow, that rhymes). My summer internship was at PwC, under a management consulting profile. I like reading, writing, swimming, doomscrolling on social media and listening to the same song on repeat 467 times (this is a cry for help). However, my favourite thing is talking about myself which I’m now going to gleefully indulge in. Let’s take it from the top -

Hell - Intern Season

There I was getting through college, day after day, unbothered by the worries that haunt the overzealous, motivated students of our fine university when the intern season hit me like a freight train. Not only was I woefully unprepared for the kind of internship I wanted but also for the overwhelming tide of deadlines, tests, shortlists, interviews and maybe most of all the stress, that was coming my way. However, if you take anything away from this horrendously self-indulgent blog post, then let it be the fact that it is never really too late to be ‘prepared’. Obviously, you should try to do the smart thing and look at past resumes, talk to your seniors(ones who have their shit together not me) and figure out something more concrete about your aim than a vague “core mein nahi jaana hai yaar” before you start working on your resume and prepping for your intended field of choice. But just in case you too are a terrible procrastinator and realise you have no clue what to do 3 days before the deadline; then one possible thing to do is doing what I did - go through old resumes and pick up the important keywords relating to fields you might think you are qualified for/interested in, then try to incorporate them into the things you have already done and then do a couple of small projects(takes a few hours to complete) related to these topics from Coursera or similar sites. This is by no means the best course of action, but it is one and that counts for something.

You have to realise that you can do your absolute best and follow every goddamn rule in the book but there might still be someone more prepared, with bigger achievements and a bolder resume and there is absolutely nothing you can do about that except focus on yourself and go at your pace. I am aware that it is essentially a race, a race to get the biggest company, the highest stipend, the best PPO but the thing is that focusing on these things doesn’t really help. The intern season is not an easy time to get by for anyone so don’t add on more stress that does nothing for you in the long run. Instead of focusing on the same, tired, yearly drivel of “yaar day 1 companies same 10 log ko shortlist karti hai”, “PT cell biki hui hai” etc, use that time to review companies that are going to come, try to talk to alumni who work there, get your jargon up to par, give mock aptitude tests and prepare HR interview questions. All the speculation and thinking about who got shortlisted first and who will get more money and all your friends getting interns before you and people you think were less qualified getting selected over you is pretty normal and something I think everyone goes through to some extent but the trick is to not let the negativity fester because of the mental toll it will have on YOU - not whoever you’re telepathically spilling vitriol over. This mental toll is probably the toughest thing you might have to face - funny story, my first shortlist was on Day 1 for Deutsche Bank, sometime around August, and my final selection in PWC was towards the end of October; so I know a thing or two about being stressed. One of the solutions for it, in my opinion, is to talk to your friends. Stop treating them like competition, be happy for them, help them and let them help you. It makes things feel better, I promise. Anyways, coming to more consult specific things, to prepare you have to do case studies. They don’t have to be very intense or in-depth but enough for you to confidently handle them in interviews and it is ten times more effective if you do it in a group rather than aloneI prepared case studies for about 2-3 days as I started preparing sometime after the shortlists came out, I recommend that you try to do better and start earlier. Your interview skills have to be up to par. Answer the questions precisely but personably. Even if you don’t know something, never let them know that you don’t know. Lying confidently works 97% of the time (see what I did there). If you crack your first interview, great but even if you don’t, it’s ok - most people I know bombed their first interview which is why it might be helpful to undergo a mock interview or two. Personally, I had a string of bad interviews and I was super upset about them but I learned what not to do from all of them so it was never truly a waste even if it felt like that at the time. Anyways, after all this doom and gloom I finally got an internship. Now let's get to what the internship experience was like -

Purgatory - The Internship

After last year’s slew of online internships, I think what I looked forward to the most was the actual experience of working in a corporate set-up with the fancy clothes and the fancier people. Unfortunately, life sucks so that's not what happened and my internship ended up being online. However, over the course of my internship I have learnt that in a consulting profile, the work of an intern in online mode really doesn’t change much from that in an offline mode. The only real notable difference is the interactions and networking that are both more productive and easier in an offline setting. Since this was the first time PwC took on undergraduate interns, the experience was interesting. I worked under the DDV workstream, which stands for Deal Delivering Value or in layman's terms - Mergers and Acquisitions. We were trained in a wide array of business analytics tools, ranging from Excel to Tableau. We sadly didn’t have much client interaction, which is my only point of complaint. I think my favourite part of the internship was the fact that they had codenames for all the companies and projects so we couldn’t leak information to outsiders or do a bit of good ol’ insider trading. It made me feel like I was handling extremely sensitive information even when I was just making slides and excel sheets. One thing of note is that everyone working there was genuinely nice and eager to help. Initially, I was hesitant about talking to senior employees or asking them doubts but they actively encourage you to interact with them. So, talk to as many people as you can, not only is it good networking but it also opens up opportunities to work on more projects and get wider exposure. I think my biggest takeaways from this internship were the understanding of how work is done in corporate and more specifically in consulting as well as better people skills. Not sure what the company got out of me but I hope it was good enough for them to not blacklist our college :)

Paradise - ?

What comes after? I don’t know. At the time of writing this, I don’t know if I will be offered a PPO or if I will take it if offered, or what to do about my upcoming placement season. So in short, I don’t really know much about what to do next (pretty on brand for me) but I do know that things have a way of working out in the end. Finally, I would like to give some well-meaning, pretentious-sounding advice - try your best but don’t hinge your happiness and self-worth on an internship selection that matters a lot less than you’re probably thinking right now. Getting a good or early internship isn’t a guarantee of everlasting professional success and not getting one isn’t a damning to the hell of unemployability. As someone who drove herself insane thinking about what-ifs, listen to me - don’t. Take each day one at a time and it’ll be over before you know it. If even after reading all this any of y’all ever want to ask me anything or even just talk, I’m available :). All the very best, future corporate slaves!

Ananya