The way I got to McKinsey is a bit unconventional. After getting my undergrad degree, I decided to work for startups. I liked the dynamic environment but, after a while, I was looking for something more stable, with more coaching from senior colleagues. I decided to switch to McKinsey.
I started in the Chile office as a business analyst. I was involved in all sort of projects, from mining to banking to transportation. During one engagement with a bank, I worked with a translator and a data scientist from our Madrid Analytics Hub. Talking with them piqued my interest, and they helped me arrange to spend my third year as a business analyst in the role of translator in Madrid, before doing my MBA. That’s what is so awesome about McKinsey: the flexibility and support I’ve received is amazing.
Being a translator involves explaining analytics to people less familiar with the discipline. I describe how the process of building an analytics model is not linear, why it takes a long time to see preliminary output, and how things that might appear trivial – like the name of a column in a table or the format of a file – can cause errors and long delays.
After my year as a translator concludes, I’ll go on to do my MBA at INSEAD. I am thrilled to go to Singapore and France for courses, to meet new people and discover new cultures. Once I graduate, I’ll return to McKinsey in the position of translator.