| A
Day in the Life of a Parthenon Associate |
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| 7:00AM |
Roll over to check the Blackberry and make sure nothing needs my presence at the office earlier than usual. No emails, so back to sleep. |
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| 7:45AM |
All too soon it is time
to wake up. After a quick shower, I iron a shirt and grab
a yogurt and the paper on the way out the door. |
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| 8:30AM |
Board the subway to work. I settle in and read the paper on the way. My roommate works downtown as well so we usually ride the subway together and trade sections of the paper. |
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| 9:00AM |
I usually arrive at the office a little before 9:00 unless something requires my presence earlier. When I really need to work without any phone calls or email interruptions the morning is the best time of day. I head into the kitchen to grab a coffee and chat with several other associates doing the same—we settle on the fact that it isn’t quite hot enough yet to stop at Dunkin Donuts on the way into work for an iced coffee, but it will be soon enough. |
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| 9:15AM |
Time to settle in and plan out my day. I have presentation tomorrow for one of my cases involving a large school district, and I know going into the day that my afternoon and evening are going to be focused on finishing up the materials for that case, so I need to check in with the principal on my second case, involving manufacturing, to see what I should prioritize this morning. |
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| 9:30AM |
My manager and I meet to go over a survey that we are putting together to gauge the satisfaction of customers of our manufacturing client. I had put together a draft of the survey and made a few test calls yesterday in preparation for this meeting, but he has a few final suggestions for questions that need to be incorporated and we discuss what the higher level hypotheses are that we want to test with this survey. |
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| 10:00AM |
I head back to my desk to finish up the draft of this survey and then coordinate with our contact at the polling company that is going to be administering the survey about the timing of when we are launching the survey and details about how the survey will be administered. |
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| 11:00AM |
After I work out the kinks in the survey it is time to switch gears to my other case. Yesterday we put together a draft of the presentation for our case team leader and now she has sent back comments that we need to incorporate for later today so that we can send the finalized version to the client tonight. My section of the presentation includes some quick edits, but also some more generalized ideas were suggested that I can really dig into and figure our how to best display the information and point we are trying to make. |
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| 12:00PM |
Time for lunch. I usually go out and grab a sandwich to eat in the lunchroom (as making a lunch requires waking up earlier!), but today I am going out to eat with my associate mentor. Each 1st year associate at Parthenon has an experienced associate as an informal mentor and today I am going out to lunch with him—the best part is that Parthenon likes to encourage taking time out our day for these events and so Parthenon is picking up the tab! |
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| 1:00PM |
Back from lunch and time to get going! I know that the principal I am working with will want to go over my section of the presentation and will likely have a few final suggestions before we are ready to send it out, so I work for the next two hours to finish up the changes that need to be made to my slides while double checking my analysis and making sure all my slides are ready to go. |
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| 3:00PM |
I print out a copy of the presentation and meet with the principal on my case to make sure everything is ready to go. After seeing how I created one slide she has a suggestion for one quick piece of analysis that would be interesting—but we only have an hour before we are scheduled to send this presentation to our case team leader for the final review. |
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| 3:15PM |
I am working with a large database for this case which has been a real analytical challenge, but everything goes smoothly and I am able to pull the data we are looking for and put it into slides just in time to send it out. |
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| 4:00PM |
Time to switch gears again to make sure that we are ready to go with the survey for my manufacturing case. It turns out the client had a few more questions they wanted to ask, so I draft them up into our current survey and pass it along to the polling company. We are also analyzing financial data for this company, so I work for awhile to understand how commodity prices over time have affected this company’s cost structure. This data is more for my understanding of how the company is affected by these commodities than for a specific question I need to answer for the case, but after spending some time digging into their financials I begin to feel comfortable with how their costs have changed over the last few years. |
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| 6:00PM |
I get the final comments back on the presentation for my other case and fortunately everything is in good shape. I make a few quick changes that were requested and we are ready to send this along to the client in preparation for our presentation tomorrow. |
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| 7:00PM |
After the presentation is sent I have some time to do some more thinking for my manufacturing case. Before we send out our survey I want to make sure we are asking all the relevant questions, so I spend some time reading a few analyst reports on the some other companies in the same industry to verify that all the issues that are facing the client and the industry are addressed in our survey. I realize that there is one of questions could use a tweak based on one report, so I make the change and resend the latest version of the survey to the principal on the case. |
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| 8:30PM |
Satisfied with the progress I made today I pack up my laptop and head home. I may have a few questions to answer in advance of the presentation tomorrow and I want to make sure I have my materials with me in case I get an email from the case team leader later. I leave the office and hop in a cab to a meet some friends for a late bite to eat on the way home. |
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