Amy Wu

Associate, Melbourne

I feel incredibly lucky to be starting my career at Strategy&. Despite only being with the firm for a short time, I’ve worked on projects in financial services and the healthcare sector. What has really stood out for me is that project teams really invest in developing the capabilities of junior staff, whether through training in technical skills, or encouraging you to engage with clients and take ownership of a portion of analysis.

In general, I think Strategy& has quite a collegiate firm culture–everyone makes an effort to get to know one another outside of work, which is aided by pretty frequent team and firmwide social events.

Morning

I start my day by getting up reasonably early to make myself a strong coffee before heading off to HIIT class around the corner. I’m lucky enough to live close to work, so after getting up, I stroll through a large city park before walking through the CBD to the client site. On the way I usually listen to podcasts or give my interstate family members a call.

Today we’re working with the client to confirm some data for an economic model which we have been working on. This involves meeting with a fellow Associate and our Job Manager to discuss our plan of action, before dialling in a client team in Hong Kong. Even as a new stater I am encouraged to contribute to the discussion, and we spend the rest of the morning actioning the relevant insights from the meeting. Midday is our daily stand-up meeting, which is when we spend 15 minutes checking in with the overall project’s progress across the relevant streams of work. After lunch a few of us go for a walk to grab our regular coffee orders from the trendy alleyway around the corner (it’s a Melbourne thing!)

Afternoon

The afternoon starts with some work on a piece of analysis about the future sales journey of our client’s customers. My colleague and I are preparing an initial view before we meet with some clients to provide feedback on our work.

At 3pm, we dial in the clients who are in Sydney and go through the deck together — the client has been in this industry for 20 years provides some fascinating insights. As an added plus, she has a great sense of humour and the meeting passes quickly. The rest of the afternoon flies by as we’re reworking the analysis — as we have an apprenticeship model, this includes my colleague taking time to coach me in excel modelling skills.

Nearing the end of our day we reconvene as a team to discuss the preliminary outputs to be completed for the project’s progress meeting tomorrow. We finish up with quick check-in with our Job Manager and some banter about what the next team event will be (our last one was virtual reality zombie hunting — so pretty hard to top!). I leave the office with a fellow junior on the project, we’re walking over to The Arbory to grab some drinks with fellow grads in my cohort and make the most of Melbourne’s last warm evenings.