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Hello Everyone! I am Samyak Jain, a fourth-year undergraduate (yes! time flies by) pursuing a major in Chemical Engineering and a minor in Management.
Introduction
One year ago, I was in the same situation as many of you would be today, both excited and nervous about the internship season. The first and foremost advice I would like to give you is that normal anxiety is fine, but don’t let it drag you down. Keep talking to your seniors for help, focus on your preparation, and most importantly, have self-confidence.
Internship Season for Me
Coming to my internship season, I could not decide upon one or two profiles. So, I kept my choices open to Consulting, FMCG, Finance, and Core Chemical. I practiced guesstimates and prepared for case interviews for consulting. I wanted to explore FMCG after the Operations Management course that I have done in my 4th semester. I didn’t prep much for finance apart from some puzzles.
I had two shortlists during Day 1. The first one in Morgan Stanley for Sales and Trading profile which I couldn’t crack. I didn’t think about it for long since I had my HUL Supply Chain interview the next day and started preparing for the same. I was confident and looking forward to getting this internship at HUL, but I somehow messed up in the interview and couldn’t get through it. I was a bit disappointed with this. I talked to a few of my seniors after this.
And here comes my second piece of advice, you need to move on quickly if you couldn’t get through some interview or a test. Many factors play a role in a selection, like your level of preparation, your performance during an interview or test and sometimes just your luck. Also, there are a ton of opportunities waiting for you further. So, rather than wasting my time ranting about it, I reviewed my two interviews - parts of the interview where I have done good, bad, or where could I have done better. And to be honest, this helped me in the third interview I gave at Miebach Consulting Group.
Interview Process at Miebach Consulting Group
So, talking about Miebach Consulting Group. It is a German Management Consulting firm specialising in Supply Chain with a presence in over 25+ countries. It came for the first time for internships in IITB and had been coming for placements for the past 2-3 years. I found the job description interesting as it would help me explore Supply Chain along with some exposure in Consulting, and hence I decided to give my best shot at it. The process was pretty simple. They shortlisted around 30 students based on resumes. Most of them belonged to Mechanical and Chemical as it is for most other Supply Chain profiles. Then there were two rounds of interviews. The first round revolved around a simple guesstimate and my tenure as an Events Manager at Abhyuday. The second round mainly was to know more about myself and had a question based on logistics, and the other was an HR question. When I learned that I was selected for the internship, I was happy and more than satisfied.
Here comes my third piece of advice, even if you get an internship early in the season, be humble and help your friends in any way possible who haven’t got an internship yet. It unknowingly creates a lot of pressure on some of your friends.
Internship Experience at Miebach Consulting Group
Fast forwarding to my internship experience at Miebach Consulting Group. They currently have two offices in India - Bengaluru and Gurgaon. I worked at the Bengaluru office. It was a great experience to have an offline internship after spending 1.5 years in online classes.
So, I worked on two projects during my internship. The first one was a Supply Chain Network Design Project for the Ice Cream Distribution of a leading FMCG company. They were going to reach the maximum production capacity for their plant in a few years. The project objective was to find the location of the secondary production facility along with the optimised network of depots (smaller distribution centres) considering cost, service level and sustainability. It was a reasonably exciting project. During the initial few weeks, my work was majorly around using Excel, which is a handy tool in working around data. There were three client meetings every week to extract the data, understand their current supply chain network and validate the analysis we performed. But my client interaction was less, and it was handled mainly by my project manager. I also used Power BI to visualise the data and also learned to make better presentations. All these technical skills I learnt during the internship itself. In the end, I got a chance to run the model to optimise the supply chain network on a tool called Coupa SCG (Supply Chain Guru). There were some more interesting aspects of the project that I could not be a part of because my internship ended.
The second project was a Traffic Study for a Logistics Partner. For this, I went on three on-site visits near Bengaluru. The project objective was to identify the logistics bottlenecks involved in establishing a warehouse at the site. It was a smaller project, and I had to submit a report as a presentation stating the observations and recommendations to the client. My co-interns also had projects on Supply Chain Network Design and Warehouse Design.
The workload varied during the different stages of the project but was manageable. Miebach has a very flat structure. Everyone was very approachable and helpful. You owned your project, and I also had enough support from my mentor. The company ambience was not great, it was just a normal office with basic requirements like cubicle, AC, etc. It was not too fancy like many other consulting firms which have cafeteria, vending machine, balconies, etc. But they were soon planning to shift to a new office. Also the people who worked at Miebach were some of the best minds in Supply Chain and there was a lot to learn from them all. Everyone was working on some different projects each having some different objective, and the approach to solve it. I got to learn what all problems that various companies have in their supply chain for example.
Conclusion
Overall, I had a good corporate experience with some exposure to the supply chain that I wished to have from my internship. During my internship, I got to know myself, my strengths and shortcomings, etc., and I look forward to applying the learnings from my internship in my career ahead, likely corporate. So, my fourth and final piece of advice to all the juniors is that you never know what lies ahead of you in life, so have confidence, keep working hard, and the rest will turn out great. All the best to all of you!
Feel free to reach out to me in case you need any help.
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