Summer Associate
8:00 am... Arrive at my office with a Wall Street Journal in one hand. After responding to emails, I quickly scan the paper for some good news.
8:30 am... I stop in the office of Charlie, a BA on my project team, who is working on analyzing the data for our project. He has run some queries that show some interesting relationships that I want to look at more closely later today.
9:30 am... My project manager, Prita, calls to see if I am free to meet for an hour or so to develop a game plan for our client presentation next week. I have all ready started preparing some slides for the presentation, so this will be a good chance for me to bounce some of my ideas off her.
11:00 am... After the meeting with Prita we have more clearly defined the objectives for next week's meeting. I can now focus more on determining how exactly I want to present the material to the client. Before spending any more time thinking about next week's presentation, I first need to develop and send out a questionnaire to the client to distribute to its sales representatives. I think before developing the questionnaire I will go talk with Georges, a fellow summer associate, who I know made up a similar questionnaire several weeks ago.
12:00 pm... Break for lunch. I am going to run over to Jimmy John's with several of the other summer interns for a quick meal.
12:30 pm... After speaking with Georges, I have a good sense of how to structure and phrase the questionnaire. I am going to write it up now and then pass it by Prita before emailing it to the client.
2:00 pm… The questionnaire has been sent off to the client. It will probably be several days before the sales reps receive it and email it back to me. Between now and then, I should contact several of the reps to arrange rep rides for later this month. Riding with the sales reps is a great way to get a firsthand look at what actually goes on in the field.
2:30 pm... All right! I got through to 3 of the reps and arranged visits to Seattle, Los Angeles and Detroit. Now I want to check back with Charlie to look at his analysis more closely.
3:00 pm... Wow, Charlie really did a great job! Several potentially interesting relationships are apparent. I need to run some more MS Access™ queries to see if I can explore these relationships in more detail.
5:00 pm... I quickly check email to give myself a break from my analysis. One message is from the Training Coordinator, who is announcing another Summer Associate training session next week, this one on the incentive compensation practice. I'm definitely attending—the sessions have been really interesting, because I see a broader view of ZS work than I can get in a summer—and I get to meet different Managers and Consultants.
5:30 pm... After several hours of manipulating databases I need a break and want to check with Kelly, a BA who is working on a sales force realignment for this client. We spend some time discussing how to balance sales representative workload.
6:30 pm... I stop by Prita's office to fill her in on the events of the day. She is also thrilled that I was able to set up the rep rides today. We discuss a few more issues that we want to explore for the meeting next week. I make a note of them so I am sure to focus on them tomorrow.
7:00 pm... As I am heading out of the office and over to the gym for a workout, I bump into another summer intern, Lily, who is busily preparing for a presentation tomorrow. I see that she has a lot of work ahead of her still, so I volunteer to help her assemble the binders that she will take to the meeting tomorrow.
8:00 pm... Off to the gym for me!