I recently completed six months at Deloitte as a Business Technology Analyst Intern and have joined the Creative Destruction Lab’s 2018 Quantum Machine Learning cohort.
Due to the starting date of the program, I had to leave Deloitte 2 months early.
For many reasons, this was not an easy decision, so I wanted to reflect on the incredible time I had at Deloitte, and shed light on some of the things I’ve had the privilege on doing in the past 6 months.
What is Deloitte Digital?
As the son of an accountant, I grew up thinking Deloitte was all about Audit, and if they hired tech/design talent, it’d be to make their website and audit tools look pretty...
So it turns out I was (very) wrong. After meeting Deloitte Digital at one of the sponsor booths at Hack the North (Canada’s largest hackathon), I discovered what Technology Consulting was all about (more about that later!).
Interview Process
I talked to a few Senior Consultants who were hackathon mentors about some of the database architecture problems my team and I were facing.
My discussions slowly changed from a technical conversation, to an informal interview with Darren Nippard, Deloitte Toronto Consulting Leader.
I had one more interview later on Skype, and not too long after that, I received an email extending an offer for an internship.
Settling in Toronto
After doing a semester exchange in Hong Kong and interning in Montreal for 4 months, I’ve become familiar with the notion of settling down in a new city.
#1 - University of Toronto
Until I came to Toronto, I never outright felt the privileges of being a student. Though I’m a student from another university, this still made me very comfortable going to UT’s Dance Club classes for West Coast Swing and Salsa.
Funnily enough the friends I made here, not only became my closest friends, but also became my referrals for my application to the CDL’s Quantum Machine Learning fellowship (I met two CDL fellows at Salsa, who’d have known!).
#2 - Meetups (Civic Tech TO)
I’m obsessed with everything underneath the umbrella of social impact.
After auditing Anita Nowak’s famous Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation class at McGill, I wanted to bring my learnings to a more technology focus. So I decided to join the Civic Tech Toronto meet-up and learn from inspiring people in the civic-tech space.
Check out some of their cool projects they’re working on. This has inspired me to launch a personal project too (coming soon - but here’s a sneak peak!).
Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting and the Hackery
During your first few weeks, you’re introduced to your coach and buddy.
Your coach mentors you to be successful in your career at the firm, and is typically a consultant at least 1–2 ranks higher than you.
Your buddy on the other hand is typically the same rank, they help you with your on-boarding process and show you how to best navigate the company.
Enterprise Service Management
I did my first rotation in Deloitte’s Enterprise Service Management consulting practice.
I was almost at the client’s office everyday working with senior managers and senior consultants on strategies, and with analysts on some QA before a public go-live for a major public transportation client.
This gave me a great exposure to the following:
- How partners and senior managers managed relationships with clients
- Delivery approaches for tech strategies to clients
- Enterprise technology implementation processes
Hackery
I then joined the Hackery as the Lead Engineer on one of the projects, and towards the end I transitioned to be the Technical Product Manager as I started to mentor other interns and influence the product roadmap.
The Hackery is Deloitte’s experimental technologies product lab, it’s also almost entirely managed by interns.
What’s great about running a venture startup within a larger company, is that you’ll rarely run into startup growth issues.
From defining the customer and use cases, to designing the user experience and building it out, we had the opportunity to only focus on the product.
One important thing I realized early on at the Hackery, was that whenever we needed industry insights or critique, a coffee meeting with a Deloitte industry leader later that week was only one email away. It’s incredible.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone who contributed to my personal and professional development over the past six months.
I will forever be grateful.
Perhaps we’ll meet again Deloitte, but until then, thank you ❤
