Weeks 2 and 3 – Personal Contributions

Reflecting on my past two weeks at AlphaSights, I have learned the ins and outs of the company and my responsibilities as a Summer Associate, and in turn I have been able to contribute to my team’s successes.  Though we have taken on a lot of responsibility as interns, I have adjusted well to it in the past two weeks on the desk.

I am assisting my trainer on the majority of his projects and contributing to delivering advisors to our clients who are perfect fits for the project.  To briefly explain my contributions, we get a brief from our client stating the company/industry they are trying to invest in, and then we initially will find advisors who we already have in our system that would be a perfect fit for the consulting call.  We present those system advisors to our client, and they request to speak with those who they see fit, and I have gotten a couple of requests on those! However, I am most proud of getting a “custom” request, which entails finding advisors on LinkedIn who have not worked with AlphaSights before, vetting them to see if they have the knowledge your clients are seeking, and getting a request from your client for that custom advisor.  This is an achievement for me because I went through the whole process of doing this on my own, and it required me to use all of the skills I have learned in the past three weeks from start to finish.  With this, I was also able to expose a new business professional to AlphaSights and show him our mission, drive, and work ethic.  I feel that achieving this definitely allowed me to contribute to my team’s success in delivering for our clients and help me gain the confidence which will help me contribute to the company’s mission.

I also feel that sharing a few of my insights about leadership has contributed to the establishment of a great relationship between me and my trainer.  For example, we have a “TCU” every week where we talk about anything regarding working style, projects, what we think is going well, etc.  I told him that I work well in a relationship-oriented environment versus task-oriented.  He completely agreed with me, and we therefore operate in a communicative and supportive way instead of giving me tasks and solely focusing on completing our tasks.  This open dialogue about our working and preferred leadership styles allows for us to be an effective team and thus an asset to our company at large.

Overall, I am just getting my foot in the door of the company and adjusting to all of the responsibilities we are given; however, I do feel that I have been able to contribute to my team and the company’s successes in the past couple of weeks, and I am looking forward to contributing even more!