Consulting with Jamie Yieh (Week 3)

Hi again,

It’s Thursday afternoon and I am flying back from Hartford to DC to catch my connection to Pittsburgh. One thing I realized (and love) about the consulting lifestyle is that the hours are long but flexible. I work extremely hard Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday putting in 11-15 hours a day but then on Thursday, I catch a break and leave the client office around 3:30PM to fly back home. And best of all, on Friday, I make a few phone calls from the office if I need a landline for a conference call but no one will yell at me if I decide to work from the comfort of my own comfy bed. The flex-time also means that you need to be flexible in terms of being open to taking a call early in the morning or late at night. Especially if the client or team is in a different time zone, you could be accommodating their West Coast time zone and scheduling an 8PM call.

This week, I interacted pretty heavily with the client. I sent e-mails to the project’s leadership (I re-read my e-mails 1,000 times before clicking send), began speaking up on some smaller conference calls (Yes, I stuttered a lot), and sat in on a pretty intense 8-hr meeting where Aetna managers discussed the next steps that needed to be taken in order to reach their 6/30 and 8/1 milestones. Something in my understanding definitely clicked this week. Another hint about making the most out of an internship especially in consulting is to keep asking questions. Anything that relates to your industry, which is really everything, counts as a legitimate question. Aetna is a health insurance company but I can relate that to healthcare providers (hospitals, clinics, etc.) and pharmaceutical companies, both retail (CVS) and manufacturer (Pzifer). I asked things specific to what I see on a document used within my project such as “Why is the PMO focusing so much on Clinical Programs versus the other workstreams?” I also went as broad as learning the different pay structures for doctors, how to reduce the cost of maintaining linens in hospitals, and the pros/cons of an HMO plan versus a PPO plan. Anything is fair game and those you ask won’t be annoyed. They see it as a “Stump the Partner or Manager” game and want to be quizzed. But once you get all of this information, be sure to try and find a connection point between your discussion and what you are experiencing on your project! It shows that you are genuinely listening and critically thinking about their responses. Since I am helping out with both the PMO and the Clinical workstream, I was able to figure out some information gaps Clinical was experiencing and connect the gaps to those of other workstreams. Hearing certain things in one meeting could very much apply to what is being discussed in another and I was able to find these relationships and advise people on who they can get clarification from. Next week is the 6/30 milestone I mentioned earlier in this post, so it will probably be a busy time at the client office. Let’s see if I can decrease the number of times I re-read an e-mail before sending to the client…

One last thing I would like to share with you is another perk! This weekend is July 4^th so all Deloitte employees get Friday and Monday off. With this rare 4-day weekend, I decided to book a trip to Myrtle with no out-of-pocket costs to me! We have this nice policy that allows me to take weekend trips to anywhere I want and I can apply the cost of the airline ticket that I would have purchased if I decided to fly back to Pittsburgh. It’s called alternative travel and if the ticket ends up being more expensive, you simply pay the difference. So with that, have a fabulous and safe 4^th of July weekend!

-Jamie