By Kendall Castañeda (CAS’21)
CCD: Tell us about your experience. What were your responsibilities?
I spent 8 weeks in Deloitte’s Risk and Financial Advisory practice working with a client on a cyber risk and security assignment. Our project was focused on an Identity Access Management (IAM) platform transition.
My main responsibility was to learn. I sat in on multiple daily meetings both with our clients and the project’s senior managers and partner, where it was my job to take and format notes, and then organize them for presentation later. I assisted in creating early stage Business Requirement Documents, and determining which deliverable items were in and out of scope of the engagement’s timeline.
I also traveled out of state to the client site on a weekly basis to assist my team in both understanding the IAM platform already in place and elaborating to the client how to transition to the new platform.
CCD: How did you get the opportunity? What resources at BU or elsewhere did you use?
I got this opportunity by attending Deloitte’s second annual STEM Summit. After learning about the opportunity from my Posse Program Coordinator in Atlanta, Georgia, I applied, interviewed, and was offered an opportunity to attend the summit.
I flew to Dallas, Texas, to Deloitte University for three days. Deloitte was focused on educating young leaders in STEM fields about opportunities at the company. After winning a robot automation and resource allocation competition along with a crowdsourcing competition, I continued to network with the Deloitte professionals at the summit. This networking continued post-summit, and a week later, I received an offer to join the firm through the Discovery Internship.
CCD: What was the best thing about the experience? What was the worst?
The best thing about the experience was that my team went out of their way to ensure I was in situations where I was learning new concepts and had the opportunity to apply myself. The worst thing was that I wish that I had joined the team at a later stage in the engagement, so I could have applied more of my computer science skills in building the new platform for the client.
CCD: What was the most memorable moment of your experience?
The most memorable moment was actually not related to my main work.
I connected with a recruiter who was involved in the Atlanta office’s Inclusion Council, and they gave me an opportunity to sit in on the first meeting of the quarter. This gave me an idea of what diversity and inclusion looks like at a large corporation.
CCD: What advice would you give to another student about making the most of an internship, job, or other career-related experience?
Put yourself out there and don’t be afraid to ask questions. All of my opportunities and moments of growth came from asking questions and pushing myself to exist outside of my comfort zone.
BU + Beyond 