4 minute read
Illuminate Consulting Group (Alumni Host, St John’s College
Lasting Impressions
I very much enjoyed the experience and was able to learn a lot about the American college
system. I worked on my time management and communication skills, and I always like pursuing
new areas. It's certainly given me a lot to think about vis a vis my career.
Work Projects
In the first half of my internship, I focused on
understanding the methodology behind different rankings
and appending 2022 rankings. This required learning how
to use certain packages in Python to web scrape, working
with thousands of data points in Excel, and learning how to
use Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications to create graphs
and analysis of said data points. In the second half of my internship, I focused more on creating
graphs to enhance presentations which were given to clients. These were mainly graphs of the
clients’ rankings in certain league tables over time. There were also times where I pulled and
scanned through staff lists to add that information to presentations or looked through to find
profiles of certain staff members. I was also able to travel to visit a client during this internship.
Over two days I attended multiple meetings in which I shadowed and took notes while my boss
presented findings from the client project. The support I received was mainly from my boss. We
had daily meetings in which we talked about my progress and questions on the work we were
doing, and he also gave a lot of advice regarding career paths and was very open to talking
about the industry.
Daily Life
Over the course of my internship, there were daily meetings scheduled with the other interns
and our boss to talk about our progress for the day and to discuss any issues. Often our boss
also spent some time talking about why our work was important or giving some insight into the
industry (including talking about specific cases where something weird had occurred or giving
background on the systems and rankings we were working with). We also sent daily emails to
the group with our progress and issues we had come across so everyone was on the same page
with regards to our work.
For the first three weeks of my internship, I was
working with someone else, so I also spent a lot of
time on Zoom working with him. After he left, most of
the interns were in different time zones, so it would
not have been possible to work as collaboratively, but
we still sent each other questions and talked about
what we were doing. To keep work-life balance, since I was sitting at my desk for most of the
day, I took short breaks in both the morning and afternoon and tried to coordinate my lunches
so I wouldn’t be eating alone. There wasn’t much else I did outside of work to relax and wind down besides keeping it from being on my mind all the time.
Lasting Impressions
I thought that I gained a lot from the internship. I was able to gain a lot of technical skills in
terms of working with Excel, programming in VBA (to generate graphs), and programming in
Python (and working with classes that involved getting information from the internet). My
employer stressed that having standards in presentations and files was important, so I was able
to embrace the idea of having everything standardized and realize how much easier that is to
work with. I was also able to gain knowledge of the industry that I hadn’t had before.
Since the internship dealt with universities, I was able to learn more about these institutions
from what I researched and experienced as an undergraduate.
The company was a consulting group, so I was able to experience working as a consultant - both
in terms of creating material for clients through presentations and Excel sheets, but also
through attending client meetings both online and in person. I was able to realize that I much
preferred working with the data and trying to find meaning in it more so than talking to clients
about it and trying to manage their expectations.
BA Economics and Management, First Year Undergraduate, remote working
Work Projects
My internship concerned a project pertaining to retrieval, cleaning, and analysis of university
rankings data. This was meant to help client universities improve their rankings by seeing the
trends of universities that had improved or deteriorated in rankings over time. For example, I
had to collect data from the Times Higher Education Impact rankings relating to the UN’s Sustainable Development goals, and then manipulate the data, including re-ranking the data,
filtering out duplicate rows, recalculating the scores and rankings based on initial raw data from
the website, making columns and graphs to analyse trends. The purpose of this was to see how
different parameters impacted the likelihood of success (such as the number of sustainable
development goals in which the data was submitted by the university, or specific policies
reported on campus).
Another example was compiling and organising specific
evidence that different universities had submitted to
score points in the ranking, in order to later show
clients what kind of submissions were helpful.
Throughout the internship, I managed to substantially
improve my ability to work with Excel and to find
shortcuts and efficient methods that allowed me to accomplish data analysis tasks more
effectively. I learned a variety of tools and functions in Excel that I had not previously been
familiar with, such as linking different sheets together through double or triple functions.
