Janet Leung is a summer intern at Deloitte
Every Monday morning, Janet Leung, a rising senior at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, leaves home at 4:45 a.m. to catch a 6:30 flight. She is a business administration major, concentrating in management, and this summer she is a consulting intern at Deloitte.
It’s Leung’s second summer at Deloitte, actually. Last year she had a local project and would drive to her client’s site about 45 minutes away from home. This year, based in Deloitte’s San Francisco office, she has a client 40 minutes north of Seattle, and so travels there before work Monday and flies home Thursday afternoon. It’s a rather typical consulting grind.
For most of the week, she lives in a hotel, but returns to San Francisco for the traditional Friday intern-activities. She says she enjoys it, and though her particular interest in consulting was sparked by the Deloitte recruiters who visited her college, she has been interested in business since high school.
“In high school I did a lot of extracurricular activities, like soccer and speech and debate, and we would have fundraisers all the time, selling $1 snacks and whatnot. The base cost was 30 cents, and you could make a 70 cent profit for each snack, so after those fundraisers I would keep selling my own snacks. Ever since then I’ve been very into business,” Leung said.
Monday – Thursday at the Client’s Site
These days, her business skills are used on a bigger scale, and her week begins with the early morning Monday flight to Seattle. She then drives to her client’s site and gets started. The work, she says, involves both assisting her manager and also working on her own projects.
“Last year there was only actually one person on my project, and she was my manager, so we were kind of attached at the hip,” Leung says. “I would go to every meeting with her, taking notes and things like that. But there were other things too – she gave me my own personal project, which I really enjoyed. I got to interview a lot of clients one-on-one, and I felt really good about the fact that she trusted me with that.”
This year, Leung’s manager has given her a project to work on by herself, though if she needs help she’s welcome to ask. On a day-to-day basis, she works mainly with mentors and clients consulting in business technology, and though she said that her business degree at Cal Poly doesn’t directly relate to her work, she thinks that the most important things she’s learning are how to be a true professional and how to build new relationships. As for new material, the Deloitte Learning Center and DeloitteNet are resources she can use to look up specific information and do research. “So DeloitteNet has become one of my best friends,” she says. “It keeps me on top of my stuff.”
Typically, she is at her desk until 5:30 or 6 p.m., at which point she checks into her hotel for the evening. The next two days of each week are typical eight-to-five work days, but because she’s travelling, Leung says that Deloitte provides two additional stipends – one for food and one for fitness. Because of this, she eats out with her colleagues and attends barre classes with another intern, keeping the Seattle portion of her week entertaining until she flies home Thursday afternoon.
