BL: So Malik, how was your time in Seattle and in Washington DC?
Malik: It was awesome! The pacific Northwest is the most beautiful place in the US and I felt this tense-bschool-post-exam tension lift off my shoulders when my plane touched down in Seattle. I had lived there before b-school, so getting the opportunity to go back for a short stint was perfect for me.
BL: What do you mean by "Short stint"?
Malik: I worked for Boeing before b-school and I knew I always had a choice to go back, so when I didn’t get an offer after a couple of final rounds consulting interviews, I make a few phone calls, and I was able to get a project for the summer. I didn’t stop applying to other firms though. The mistake I had made in my summer job search was to target only consulting companies and only the top four to be precise.
Anyway, I applied online and sent out about 40 emails in February to the World Bank contacts I had gotten from the alumni database and through friends. I was extended an interview by the Bank in Washington DC in late March while on study-travel to China. Most graduates students with MBAs that apply to The World Bank Group typically go to the IFC but I specifically requested the Bank because of my interest in International Development and sustainable business models in emerging markets. I guess my post-final-round-consulting hustle earned me a few cool interviews and I was fortunate to land this internship (or "short-term consultancy" in bank-speak) on my return from China and after a phone interview in NY and an in-person interview in DC. I was able to convince my manager at Boeing that six weeks was enough to do some meaningful stuff. That left me with eight weeks at the Bank. My boss was fine with it but it meant that I had no time off all summer and as a peer advisor, I also had to return early which meant overtime at the Bank to make up for the last week.
So first Boeing. They had me working on the Technical Strategy team within the Commercial Airplanes Group. I wasn’t working 18 hr days like the bankers but sometimes the 8 hrs I was there everyday got pretty intense depending on what point I was in each of my deliverables. I had three of them: (a) to develop a model to evaluate test scorecards on projects (b) to solve the backlog in the procurement process and (c) to do a comparative study on risk assessment on the new airplane business plan and the input my team was delivering.
Part (a) involved using stuff like flex and variance analysis from Managerial Accounting and some decision modeling stuff. I built an excel model that was uploaded with raw project data from a database and then subsequently calculated project progress or maturity and critical stages based on a set of criteria. This criteria from a firm-wide set of procedures helped decide which projects got more funding or needed more attention.
Part (b) was all CEO [Creating Effective Organizations core course]…I was totally managing my social capital and expanded my structural holes. The procurement process had a lot of bottlenecks (both systematic and human). I basically had to get the engineers and the purchasers together in an all day meeting to address several concerns that both teams had, but had not been communicated. I spent about a week just coming up to speed on the purchasers end, grasping the terminology, and getting friendly enough to let them open up to me about the actual process-stoppers. After earning their trust I was able to learn about the problems they faced including difficulties arising from having two operating systems all the way to small nuances like the lack of some drop down menu on the online site that would have facilitated faster documentation times. Our interaction enabled me to contribute specific recommendations during the meeting and to document expected results after my internship was over.
Part (c) involved learning about the risk assessment methodology on the new airplane program and comparing it to the existing model my team had been using. I then made recommendations on what type of strategic support role my team will be able to provide to that program either by adoption of their tool or finding synergy between both tools. I recommended the first option since the latter meant hours trying to get two different systems to communicate. I had learned from part (b) that the headache was not worth it.
BL: It sounds like you actually used stuff you learned in your core classes?
Malik: No doubt! People are always ragging on one core class or the other but I am happy I took those classes cause it enabled me to have like intelligent convos… Anyway, after the six weeks, I was off to the DC. The work at this joint is completely different from Boeing as you can imagine. One responsibility I had was to turn a technical paper draft on rural transport policy in Africa into a dissemination material. On the first day, my boss gave me like five gazillions policy and development papers to read. It was scary. I had to come up to speed on the existing works and be ready to contribute to the weekly meetings. The dialogue at the meetings was incredible and my favorite part was sitting in a conference room with three to five people from five different parts of the world who at any point spoke up to a combined fifteen languages. It was hot!! I definitely feel an extra incentive to go relearn my French and start learning Spanish. From my readings and research, I developed a couple of cases studies from Ethiopia, Mozambique and Nigeria to include as Appendices in the paper and I then I turned my attention to my other responsibility which was helping in the development of a roadmap to mitigate HIV/AIDS in regional west Africa.
My team focused on a couple of inter-country transport roads where truckers frequent brothels when away from home and looked at ways to increase awareness, protection and efficient distribution of preventative material. My main job though was helping set up a preliminary workshop in Nigeria to address such issues. After a couple of meetings involved medical doctors, project managers and senior transport specialists, I drafted a working note that indicated what direction we intended to go with the project. The only snag was that in August most of the team went on vacation or traveled "on mission" into the target countries. I was scheduled to go "on mission" too to Africa but unfortunately, my trip got canceled because our host country was not ready for a large meeting and my boss thought it might be waste of money to go there and not meet with the main stakeholders in the HIV/AIDS program. August was spent mostly reading papers on rural transport and writing short case studies to include in a technical paper my boss was working on. Nevertheless, the work was surreal in a sense…people are dying at alarming rates in Africa but because we are so removed from the situation, it is easy to treat it as an issue addressed between 9 to 5.
Fortunately, I had some friends from undergrad who had either volunteered in the Peace Corps, or served in other various ways in developing countries, and who happened to be around this summer. We had a few dinners where we sat and talked about our experiences abroad and our individual roles in the future. I think the take away is that we might not be able to change the world in a few years but the mentality has to be one of a life long commitment to serving the poor in whatever capacity we find ourselves whether through government and policy, international business and developing financial markets for third world countries, or simple spending a few weeks every year in developing countries to keep one’s perspective fresh.
BL: Hey I wish we had more time to explore some more of the stuff you worked on but we are out of time. Best of luck and hopefully more people will think about the non-profit/development world for their summers.
Malik: I hope so too. Thanks for the time.