Ten Weeks, Two Cities, and a Crash Course in Consulting

This summer, I had the opportunity to intern with a global consulting firm, based out of their Boston office. The internship started toward the end of May and ran through July 31st, and looking back now, those ten weeks feel like they packed in a year's worth of learning and living.

We kicked things off with a week of training in Dallas. It was intense, but it was also the first time I really got to know the cohort of interns I would spend the summer with, some of whom, it turns out, would become genuinely great friends. From there, I was thrown straight into a live project with an oil and gas company, working on a regional optimization initiative. My background wasn't in oil and gas, and there wasn't much runway to ease into it. We were expected to start contributing meaningfully from week one.

That timeline forced me to get resourceful fast. I leaned heavily on the firm's in-house AI agent to quickly get up to speed, on the industry itself, on what the client had tried in the past, and on where they were headed next. It didn't replace the learning curve, but it compressed it. And somewhere in that scramble, I realized how much of what I'd absorbed at Fisher was actually showing up in real time. The financial modeling, the operational thinking, all of it became less like classroom material and more like a toolkit I reached for instinctively.

The ten weeks built toward an end-of-summer presentation, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole experience. It was my chance to lay out everything I had learned, not just about the industry or the project, but about how I work under pressure and how quickly I could adapt when the ground was unfamiliar.

But if I'm honest, the presentation wasn't even the best part. The best part was everything that happened around it. Somewhere between the late nights and the client meetings, this internship turned into something more social than I expected. There was a sail party at the Boston Regatta, an Impact Day, and an end-of-summer celebration that felt less like a corporate send-off and more like saying goodbye to friends. I made connections not just with interns in my own office, but with people from other projects and other offices entirely, the kind of friendships that outlasted the internship itself.

And then there was Boston. This was my first time in the city, and I really didn't know what to expect. What I found was a place where history and modern life sit comfortably side by side, old cobblestone streets a few blocks from glass towers, centuries of history wrapped around a very current, very alive city.

I caught a game at Fenway Park, which felt like a rite of passage. I wandered into the North End for Italian pastries that were worth every bit of the hype. And on the weekends, I got to explore beyond the city itself, a trip to Salem, a day in Rockport, a drive down into parts of Rhode Island, and even a whale watching trip that turned into one of my favorite memories of the summer. If you love seafood, Boston might just be one of the best cities in the country to be in.

Ten weeks, two cities, and a project I knew nothing about going in. I left with a clearer sense of how much I can learn when I have to, and with friendships and memories that had nothing to do with the industry at all.