At Bain I have had the chance to work with exceptional people and to get the coaching and feedback to continue my professional development.

• Why Bain?

  Consulting brings you the opportunity to work on a wide variety of cases, industries and functional areas. It is really a unique environment to learn in because of the variety of problems you face and the level of responsibility you get in a considerably short period of time.
  At Bain I have had the chance to work with exceptional people and to get the coaching and feedback to continue my professional development. I have also found an extraordinary environment of comradely where everyone is willing to help each other and where people are motivated and enthusiastic about what they do.
  

• My passion

  I really like Bain's international focus and the strong links that exist through its global network. Since the first day you participate in international trainings and you get to know people from a number of different offices. You can always relay on a global network of people willing to support you, and this is something very unique. 
  I try to spend most of my free time with my friends and family and also travelling. I also enjoy Bain's fun club events, which are an excellent way to share some time with other Bainies outside the office!
  

• My favorite case

  My favorite case was a four weeks vendors due diligence in which we had to evaluate the market, the competitive position, and the business plan of a leading European internet retailer of photographic products. Bain's four person team did a great job understanding a relatively new market and designing a model to evaluate the company's potential in a consolidating environment.

  Our client was a Private Equity Group who was thinking about the future of the company it had a acquired a few years ago and who wanted to evaluate potential alternatives for the next years.

  Working closely with the target company's management team, we had to design a methodology to forecast the potential growth of a relatively new market in the following years. To do so, we made use of all kind of resources: secondary research of market reports, interviews to understand consumers' behavior and patterns of use and even several surveys to get to know the product's degree of awareness and the company's competitive positioning.

  Apart from our work as a team, we also got support and inputs from another of other Bainies in other offices, who were users of the product and gave us their ideas and perspective of the market. I was impressed by the enthusiasm and willingness to help from people in all of the European offices and it was a very enriching experience to learn about the different regional differences in the market.

  We ended up not only producing a report about the market and the company, but also assisting our client in refining its future business plan with the insights we got from our research. The client was extremely satisfied about both the final outcome and the overall process of working together with them.

  Finally, I also enjoyed the team experience. We did a great job sharing the information we got, brainstorming together about new ways of getting around the difficulties and communicating results to the client.
   

• My personal results story

  During my summer internship at Bain I worked on a project for a leading Business School that was facing some trouble due to the reduction of the executive programs' demand as a result of the economic crisis. Executive programs were the main source of revenue for this school and the focus of cost reduction of main multinationals had led the School to a difficult and unsustainable situation.
  Our team worked closely with the Business School management and the team of professors to identify number of potential initiatives to develop new revenue streams for the school while trying to constraint costs at the same time.
  We also interviewed a number of corporate clients to understand the reasons behind the reduction of executive education demand and to identify alternative educational content that could bring them additional value.
  The project was challenging because we had to manage the interests and perspective of a wide variety of stakeholders and to convince and mobilize the school's professors, who were initially unwilling to change their traditional approach to education.
  Finally, we got outstanding feedback from the client and we managed to design with them a plan that exceeded their initial goals for the first two years by more than 20%
  

• My perspective on diversity at Bain

  You can find diversity in Bain across a number of different dimensions, and it is the variety of interesting people and profiles which makes Bain such an enriching place to work.
  In particular, I have been mostly involved in the Women at Bain initiative. This is a global initiative that involves all Bain's offices, but there are also specific activities that take place at a local level. In particular, I have really enjoyed the brunches we shared with executive women from a variety of industries (from non profit to corporate and entrepreneurship) in which they told us about their experiences in the business world. It was an excellent opportunity to learn about their perspective and to have an open forum to discuss our professional concerns and get their advice.
  

• A final thought

  It is not easy to decide where you want to work. To find out, I think the best you can do is try to learn about the work and the people as much as you can. Everyone here at Bain is willing to share their experience and their thoughts about the work, and the interview process is also a good way to better understand the kind of problems and challenges you would face in your day to day.