I started work at BCG in July this year, and was eager to do my job well and settle in. Starting with a top consulting company can be an exciting, anxious and stressful time. On top of assimilating a new company culture, I was also experiencing a new city and culture. To perform well, you need to have a clear understanding of the expectations on you. In particular with consulting, we land in new environments and need to get up to speed fast. After six months in, I have a firmer grasp on the expectations and how to succeed at the job. I wanted to write up a reflection on this starting period and provide some advice for others. I want to provide some practical tips on getting orientated at the company and getting up to speed on cases.
A long time ago I heard about 'six degrees of separation', and the topic recently came up in a BCG training lecture. We were shown the 'Oracle of Bacon' site which shows actor's relationship to Kevin Bacon. I was curious what was the maximum relationship level, so I got to coding. I found this especially interesting as I have recently completed an algorithms course and this looked like a great use case for testing out a breadth-first-search algorithm. I had recently completed another toy project that needed some graphing algorithms so I saw this as a great chance to practice further.
Updated in mid-July 2020. This article is the looks to summarise the learnings from a semester studying Machine Learning. I reflect on the course, discuss the three branches of machine learning, and kick off with an example. We look at a 'decision tree' model on customer satisfaction data, and touch on the fundamental topic of overfitting and underfitting.