I love my job. It's hard. Painfully hard sometimes, but I love it. My most recent "man, I love what I do" moment was when I switched from spending ~16 hours/day researching the convenience store industry to spending an entire day learning about how water is used in power plants, with really no ceremonious break in between.
Here's an overview of what I've been up to at Oliver Wyman:
My first six weeks were spent supporting the building of a risk-analysis financial model for a proposed power plant. Basically, the developers of the power plant hired us to validate their own economic forecasts and to add "risk" to their model - i.e. we can tell an investor what the best vs. worst case scenarios look like, or what would happen if fuel prices went up or down, or if x or y other thing happened... with 95% certainty (dependent on our assumptions). I performed some commodity price research and spent a lot of time building macros (a type of computer programming) in Excel to facilitate the function of the model. I worked out of the Oliver Wyman office in Dallas, remote from the rest of my team who were in our Toronto office.
My next two weeks were spent at week-long training sessions in Chicago and Boston. Ideally, said training would have come before my first assignment, but that's how things turned out. I had a great time meeting other new hires, getting to know the firm better, being nostalgic about Chicago (I had no idea how much I missed that city), and exploring Boston.
Following training, I joined my next client team at an airline in Dallas. However, it turned out that the project they were gearing me up to take over was shut down half-way through that week, so my time with that project was rather short lived. Only a week all-in-all and I didn't really have the chance to do much besides learn about the airline industry.
The next week was spent again working in our Dallas office helping a partner prepare materials for a workshop he was going to give at a potential client in New Zealand. Not my favorite assignment, and I finished that week very eager to get some real client-based work.
That wish was granted. On a Friday afternoon of that week I was informed that I'd be joining a small team in Houston working for the retail-arm of an oil/gas company. I flew down the following Monday morning and set right to my work: researching potential convenience store partners for our client. Basically, our client had determined that their gas wasn't selling as well as they would like and the major factor driving their drop in market share was their aging convenience stores. So it was my job to research convenience stores to identify potential partners for them. Very fun work, great team, great client team. I spent three weeks there, just finishing up this last Friday.
And tomorrow I'm flying out to San Francisco for my next project. I'll be working out of our office there (as opposed to the client's office, which is the norm) becoming an expert on the usage of water in power plants and performing a market analysis for all products and services related thereto. Our client is a utility company looking to invest in the water management business, so we're helping advise that move. I expect to be on this project for 4-7 weeks.
It's all been fascinating stuff. I love the diversity of projects I've been on so far and I'm excited to see what else comes down the road in the future. It's a hard job with difficult expectations and deadlines, but I've loved the challenge.
