I also had several female friends who had worked at Bain and spoke very highly of the excellent work/life balance.

• Why Bain?

  While working in industry, I enjoyed finding new challenges and changed roles every year or so. Large industrial companies are not ideally set up to facilitate this type of career path so I moved to consulting where the very nature of the job provides the variety I craved. After working in consulting for some years and educating myself about the sector, I decided to move to Bain. I expect in the future I shall move back to the US and I believe Bain has the best brand in North America among people who really understand the industry. I also had several female friends who had worked at Bain and spoke very highly of the excellent work / life balance. The final deciding factor was that I'm really interested in private equity work and if that's something you want to do then there's just not a better place to do it.

  Coming from another consulting company, it's very impressive how much time, money and resources are allocated to training here at Bain. At my previous employer, the training was much shorter and more ad hoc. Arriving at Bain, I was allowed to attend a global training program focused entirely on hard analytics to help me brush up on skills I had not used for some time. I then attended a totally different, complementary program to learn softer skills such as communication and team management. It has been incredible to take advantage of the full spectrum of training that Bain delivers in such a short space of time.

• My passion

  Working in the Dubai, I am passionate about promoting women and dispelling the myth that the Middle East is an environment that isn't female friendly. I'm very keen to promote the impact women have here in the Dubai office and beyond; I'm currently working with a partner in Madrid to help drive the women's initiative across the region.
  
  Outside of work, I am something of an adrenaline junkie and do everything from scuba-diving with sharks to sky-diving to running marathons. I enjoy trying to convince my team members to join me in some of my thrill-seeking adventures!

• My favorite case

  Recently, I've been working on a variety of different client proposals. My latest piece of work has been for the largest luxury fashion distributor in the Middle East. We've never worked in this space before because, although we have extensive experience with luxury fashion brands, in the Middle East the brands have to be marketed via a distributor. It is a fascinating project to pitch because the company is family-owned and so has almost no publicly available data. I've worked very closely with my manager to make the initial contacts, meet with the CFO and project manager to understand the scope of the project and to write the proposal for our office head to deliver to the CEO.
  

• A final thought

  For me, it is very important to work with people that I can look up to and that I know I can learn from. I would advise that you make your career choice based on what group of people you want to be around and to be associated with.