by Kevin
Welcome to the first of our (hopefully) several guest blog posts from young professionals! These guest bloggers will provide you with a perspective from a professional who is going through similar challenges as you are right now (or perhaps you will in the near future), and more importantly, they’ll share how they overcame them! Challenges will include finishing college, deciding on moving forward with an MBA (or where to attend), finding that first job, or transitioning to the next one, and more….these guest bloggers have just about seen it all--and survived!
Our first guest blogger is Ornella Gashumba. Ornella has had an exciting journey which has led her to a role as Senior Strategy Consultant at the Chief Analytics Office at IBM. She is now living in New York (although that was a challenge in itself, as she will describe), but that is definitely not where her journey began. From Rwanda to New York (and a couple of midwestern states thrown in): she has made some difficult (yet exciting) decisions (with a little mentoring help) that have positioned her for success.
Specifically, I have asked Ornella to tell us about the steps it took to begin a career in consulting. I also asked her to walk us through her process to narrow down the firms she considered. If you have any specific questions for Ornella about her journey or want to learn more about a career in consulting, please email me at kevin@mentoringyourmission.com. Ornella would be happy to provide additional information. So, I will let Ornella take it from here…
by Ornella
I graduated from Oklahoma Christian University (OC) with degrees in Math and Finance. While at OC, I interned at BancFirst and met Kevin through a mutual friend and mentor. Luckily, Kevin also went on to become a mentor of mine. Shortly after graduation in 2016, I took my first job as a financial analyst for a startup in Oklahoma City. Though I thoroughly enjoyed my experience in that role, I knew I wanted exposure to many business models and types of business problems in a relatively short time early on in my career. Business consulting seemed like a good avenue to acquire such experience. I knew that every year, consulting companies recruit about one third of business school graduates in the US. So, in order to get a foot in the door of the consulting firms I was interested in joining, I started researching graduate business degrees. I enrolled in the University of Notre Dame’s Master’s of Entrepreneurship in 2017.
While at Notre Dame, I worked part time as a market researcher and an entrepreneurial- lead helping student and faculty startups flesh out their business value propositions and their go to market strategies. Additionally, I wrote my thesis on the ways through which a mature consulting company can leverage cloud computing to expand their client base from typically large firms to small & medium businesses. Finally, I practiced case interviews and took advantage of the career services offered by the school such as networking sessions, and resume review sessions. I also attended career fairs, and they turned out to be the easiest way to meet recruiters from the consulting firms I was hoping to join.
While going through the interview process with consulting firms, I realized that I prefer going home to my own apartment every day over the typical travel-heavy consulting lifestyle. So, I started focusing mainly on companies with internal consulting arms and got an offer from my current employer and moved to New York. Although I love New York now, apartment hunting was a challenge especially because I was new to the city. Over the summer after graduation, I spent a couple weeks at a family friend’s house in Queens and researched housing online. I scoured through multiple apps to find an apartment within my budget as well as a reasonable commute to my future office. When I had a few options selected, I reached out to my friends and future coworkers who already lived in New York for advice on which neighborhoods were most fun and accessible. After visiting a couple apartments and neighborhoods in person, one apartment in particular suited my needs so I signed a lease and finally had a place to call home.
As I look back on my experience as a strategy consultant for the past 2 years, I am thankful that many of my expectations for consulting were met. One of my favorite things about consulting is the opportunity to work on interesting projects with a group of very smart people from all nationalities and educational backgrounds. In my team, we use advanced statistics and machine learning methodologies to solve business problems. One of the perks of consulting is the option to easily rotate from project to project. Over the last two years, I have been on projects ranging from forecasting my employer’s quarterly revenue, to recommending optimal project staffing levels for our services business. In my experience with consulting, projects can be challenging because they require learning about a new domain very quickly and delivering results. But that’s what makes it also very rewarding. Finally, consulting projects tend to move from a hypothesis about a problem, to developing a solution collaboratively and presenting it to stakeholders. Through these project iterations, a consultant grows their business acumen, develops skills in data analysis, critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and communication, all of which are valuable in any role long after one exits consulting. Although I do not plan to leave consulting as of yet, I am glad that my consulting career will have equipped me for the next step on my journey.