Internship Spotlight: Liam Baskin at Bain and Company

Liam Baskin Headshot

Liam Baskin

Class: Senior  Major(s): Canfield BHP/Plan II  Internship: Associate Consulting Intern  Company: Bain and Company

Topics of Interest: Consulting and Intellectual Property

Let’s talk about consulting. Many of our students are passionate about the profession but we also understand that navigating the dos and don’ts of a new internship in consulting while working remotely can sometimes be quite arduous. We recently caught up with Liam Baskin, a Canfield BHP rising senior also majoring in Plan II Honors who completed an internship with Bain and Company over the summer while working remotely. 

While Liam’s interests lead to a consulting career, his path is not a lonely one. He and his sister Terrill, also a Canfield BHPeer and Plan II student, share similar passions in consulting and work at competing firms. “She’s at BCG and I’m at [Bain and Company]. We recruited together and we’ve been through the exact same thing for pretty much three years, which has been interesting.” Liam says.

As an Associate Consulting Intern at Bain and Company, Liam trained for two weeks and was quickly “plugged” into a case at the firm. “My case is probably a little bit less conventional because I’m not working for a client. I’m doing IP (Intellectual Property) work for [Bain and Company] so they are my client.” Liam explained. 

Liam shared some details about his experience working remotely for the first time:

“It’s been a cool opportunity to work from home—it’s been interesting. I live at my college house because the nature of my parent’s business meant I couldn’t work at home. I also can’t work near my sister because she’s at a competing firm so I can’t do my Bain work in front of her. Bain and Company knew my work from home setup was a bit tricky because there are a lot of people in our house all of the time so I got staffed on IP (Intellectual Property), which is a little more sustainable.”

As the first intern class to go digital at Bain and Company this year, Liam talks about the difficulty his firm faced and what his expectations were as he entered a new working environment:

“We were the first intern class to be purely digital. To Bain’s credit, I think they did a great job given the digital medium, which is just tough in-and-of-itself. My goal going into it was to do the best work I could given my living situation because it’s hard for me to work late at night since our house isn’t that big. There are always people moving in and out of it. I talked to [Bain] and said, “Hey, I’d love a sustainable case and I’d love to work with people who are cultural leaders” and that’s what they gave me. I’ve been working on inventory management tools that Bain is going to use and it’s been quite a journey. I tried not to set expectations because they’ve continually changed. The best thing I could do was to plan out my strategy and figure out what the next step was as I got there.”

Working remotely can help develop new skills just like earning them while on the job in person—a huge benefit that comes with an internship. While he navigated a remote feedback loop online, Liam also shares how he overcame challenging moments and learned from them:

“You get a different set of skills. Both in-person and digitally, there’s a lot of focus on communicating the right deliverables, mostly through PowerPoint.. Once you’ve done the work, the way you communicate the result is fundamentally the same. I’ve gotten the opportunity to touch the entire process. The main challenge digitally is the feedback is laggy. In-person, you can go show them your laptop and say, “Hey, what is this? Does this work?” and online, the feedback is much slower.”

“If you have the expectation that you’re going to get your feedback quickly, it definitely would be a point of frustration. They have developed my workstream and the project with the idea in mind that I might not be doing something at every single moment just because it’s hard to bump back and iterate quickly enough sometimes. But for the most part, it’s been fine and I’ve been busy. Within the medium, I think we’ve been doing a good job. It’s been an iterative process. I’ve definitely seen everyone getting better at it as we’ve moved along. There are certain strategies that we learned to develop like Zoom voiceovers. That was a great tool to be able to walk through everything that you wanted to and give it to someone else. Then they could have all the information at one time on their schedule. One big perk I realized for interns is that it’s super easy to talk to anyone I wanted to. I can call anyone from any office about anything and they would talk to me—partially because everything’s online and more open. It’s more exploratory, which is a nice reward.”

Asked about what he enjoyed most about the internship, Liam had this to say:

“The interesting thing about the internship is there’s a lot of support but also responsibility. I’m never the last one to touch anything in a project, but I could be. It also showed me the difference between school and a real job. At the end of the day, everything actually has to be perfect. Especially in Consulting; we’re hired to give other people the right answers. We’re the ones who can’t be wrong—that’s not to say that we can’t be wrong along the way, because we definitely have been a bunch, but at the end of the day, it has to be right.”

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