…and yet somehow managed to squeeze in 4 store phone calls, an Experience Sharing lunch, a Farewell lunch for my supervisor (who’s leaving for grad school), and Harry Potter Part 7:2.
My supervisor is going to law school in a couple weeks, so we had a farewell lunch for her this week. I’ll miss her a lot – she was the person with whom I’ve worked most closely so far, of course, and she’s always been my go-to person whenever I had any questions. We also had our final PD conversation and mid-performance review before she left, which was really nice since I’ll have a different supervisor from next week, and it’ll obviously take us a little time to get to know each other. Workplans will soon be changing, too – based on feedback from the Executive Team update – and so there’s bound to be quite a few shakeups beginning next week.
This week, though, was also my chance to share what’s been happening on my case with all the rest of the interns at our Experience Sharing lunch. Because we each get to see only the very smallest of slices of what Bain does as an organization, the Experience Sharing lunch is our chance to hear from everyone else in an organized setting about what their case teams have been like: what types of analyses they’ve been doing, what their case team events have been like, what their supervisors’ management styles are, etc. I’d talked to most of the interns about their cases informally, of course, but free food and a special time set aside on all our calendars never hurts! It was especially interesting to hear about those cases where the work the interns were doing seemed most different from my own: where interns were working on Excel models, in the Private Equity Group, or analyzing surveys, for example.
In any case, this is actually what my calendar looked like this week (the events have been blanked out, of course, but the times are real):
As you can see, the week before a client update seems to be rather hectic. Friday, especially, we were trying to make sure everything was in place before the final deck review with the client on Monday, so there was a big push to get everything done. It’s just like what I had expected – a fairly stable workweek until those special weeks once in a while when we have something to get to the client and there’s a little bit of time pressure on Bain’s end.
[Sidenote: for the first and only time during this internship, I had to come in on Sunday this week to finish up some work. I came in to make sure the final version of the deck for our Executive Team presentation would be perfect – luckily, I only had to stay for a couple hours, and I got to expense dinner! A win all around.]
But FRIDAY was the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and there was no way I was going to miss that. Spoiler alert: the following passage contains a lot of Harry Potter geeking out. Please feel free to skip!
Anyway, a group of 8 interns decided to go together, and we had a fabulous time. We ate across the street from the theater and went to the 9 o’clock showing – it was sold out and the audience was perfect for a Harry Potter fan like me: cheering and applauding at the right parts (including Bellatrix’s last scene and Molly’s awesome line), booing Voldemort whenever he was on screen, aww’ing towards the end as Harry finds the Resurrection Stone and sees his parents again…it was perfect. I think those my age have been the people who have truly “grown up” with Harry Potter, and I felt like the end of the Harry Potter movies was signaling the end of my own childhood – but it was great while it lasted, and I’m proud to have been part of the HP generation.
Filed under: Case team experience, Internships, Outside the office, Week in the life
