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Bain & Co. has three offices in India; Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi. My home office was Bangalore. However, If the case demanded, interns did travel to another office or to the client site along with the team.
The physical presence was truly refreshing after 1.5 years of online classes. Although I worked with my team in person for only 1 week (most of the work was done online), it was nice to go to the office and work alongside my co-interns. Additionally, it gave me an opportunity to interact with people from the company other than my case team and get to know about their experiences and perspectives.
I had chosen Bangalore as it was a new city and I had always wanted to go there. We were put up in ITC Gardenia for the entire course of the internship and the office was within a walking distance, so I didn’t have to deal with the dreaded Bangalore traffic :P
The experience of living in Bangalore was quite magnificent. We got to explore all the local food places, had authentic south Indian food, partied on the weekends (the party culture of Bangalore is really something to look forward to), and explored a bunch of places in Bangalore. I think this aspect of an offline internship adds to the experience and makes it that much more enjoyable.
We also got to go to Goa for a weekend for our Mid-term presentations, where we stayed at The W. It served as a restorative break in the middle of the internship supplemented by pre-booked spa slots for us interns and partied at Thalassa xD.
Now, coming to the actual work in the internship :P, it was a 9 week-long internship. The first week was occupied by training in the Delhi office for all the interns. We then got allotted cases and moved to each of our respective home offices. We had our mid-term presentation after 4 weeks and end-term presentations 4 weeks after that. We were put on ongoing cases at the firm. The initial few weeks were spent on ramping up on the cases and understanding the work done by the case teams. Each of our case teams were super helpful here. After this, we got little pieces of work that were in a supporting role to the broader work context and once we got our bearings, we slowly moved to owning parts of the work, all on our own.
The internship being hectic or not, depended on the case that we got. I personally did have a couple of weeks where we had to work long hours, but it was manageable overall from an internship perspective. A few things that I noticed in Bain were that we rarely were the only people working late, generally, the entire team had to stay up and get done with the work. There were definitely times that we were asked to close early by our supervisors if our part of the work was done or if there wasn’t anything extra that we could help with that day. The work and the teams were generally flexible in terms of breaks. We could have mid-day breaks for going to the gym or for a long lunch. One striking thing was there was absolutely no work to be done on the weekend. Bain also had weekly check-ins to check on the sustainability of the case-team based on the length, and intensity of the hours and also the breaks we got during working hours. These scores were diligently monitored and the case team leadership took active steps to improve the same and make it a better working environment for everyone, in all aspects.
We interns were treated the same as employees in every aspect, maybe even pampered a little more ;) We were included in all the meetings of our teams and our opinions and suggestions on the working of the team mattered as much as everyone else. We had supervisors who were incredibly patient and taught us all that was required to do our work well. There were also regular chats we had with them to assess how we were doing, what was going well and what could be improved upon, and what we could do for the same. We also had buddies allotted to us whom we could reach out to for any issues that we faced during the internship. Apart from this, the entire organizing team also took regular feedback from us about our experience and was extremely helpful.