Ishita Basu: Our second year MBA student specializing in HR shares her Internship Experience at Deloitte

One of the high points of my life here at SIBM Bengaluru was the day I got placed at Deloitte Consulting for the Summer Internship Programme.

At Deloitte, I got the opportunity to experience corporate life at its best and developed new skills while honing my existing ones. I was working under the Human Capital division of Deloitte and was aligned to the Organization Transformation and Talent service line. It is truly incredible what the elaborate Summer Internship programme at Deloitte has to offer in a short span of two months. In my first week, me and 11 others interning with me, were taken through a series of training where we went back to the very basics. I realized that there was a universe of things that I did not know about MS Word and MS PowerPoint! We were introduced to story-boarding tools and encouraged to apply the training in our work, which we rightly did! All the training and the on-boarding sessions where I learnt more about the culture and structure of this complex organization proved to be immensely helpful in my project later on.

In my second week I got staffed on a learning solutions project and this was truly the turning point in my internship. Initially, I was a little sceptical about how smoothly will we be able to connect because my entire team was virtual but soon I understood that one of the primary reasons that Deloitte is the biggest of the Big 4s is because it functions brilliantly out of virtual teams. I connected with my project team across the globe on daily status calls. I was lucky enough to work in a team who first of all, onboarded me onto a project ongoing for more than a year, very patiently. Secondly, after getting a better sense of understanding of the work that we were trying to accomplish, I was able to suggest ideas that my team trusted me with incorporating.

Apart from the project that was allotted to me, I was also given a Firm Initiative to work on. And there was no cap on the number of firm initiatives one could take up. I was engaged in three initiatives during my eight weeks and each one of them gave me the opportunity to learn something new. One of the initiatives required me to develop hands-on experience on a microsite development tool – something I had never used before. I realized that in my eight weeks here, I had slipped into the category of people who love the work that they do.

The flat culture of the organization was reflected in every stage of the internship programme. Every single practitioner, including the leadership, is extremely approachable and readily provided means to help us interns whenever we faced any roadblocks. In my discussions with some of the senior managers, I was able to gain better insights about the organization’s culture and ways to make the best of my time there. We were never afraid to ask the difficult questions. They call it ‘Culture of Courage’ at Deloitte and this is one of the many things that I took back with me. In the entire duration of two months, I was never treated like an intern. I enjoyed all the perks given to a full time employee. I was assigned a counsellor which was one of the best things about my time there. My counsellor guided me through every step of the way and helped me grow professionally as well as an individual.

From feeling a little lost and overwhelmed on the first day to completing more than 300 hours on the project, connecting with practitioners across the globe, having the client appreciate your contribution to the team…interning with the biggest of the Big 4s has been a series of little victories! And as the saying in Deloitte goes, I am proud to say that this summer, I did #MakeItMatter.