Deloitte Interview Prep
Applied Statistics and Data Science:
"Putting it all together"; Using R to analyze large datasets, final project was an analysis of college basketball free throw shooting data.
FourFront
1. FourFront: a. Company adapted to offer my internship completely virtually, which was an unforgettable experience. My main function at FourFront consisted of collecting and analyzing search engine data, as well as researching competitor websites and SEO updates from Google, in order to inform clients on how to improve their rankings in search results and create content that raised their E-A-T (a Google term that stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness). i. Google has gotten smart, it can understand when a website is trying to rank high solely to get traffic, or when the website is creating user-centric content. This requires you to totally understand the user, their needs, where they are in the sales funnel, and provide web pages that specifically answer their demands ii. KPIs: Link clicks, bounce-rate, most popular pages, average monthly search volume for keywords. iii. I helped create data visualizations in Excel and GDS to clearly communicate to the client the SEO status of their websites, while I also monitored internal GDS reports regularly so that I could inform FourFront of positive trends or red flags that required the creation of tasks. i. Creativity came out when constructing wireframes for websites with poor UX design. Allowed me to include page assets (i.e. testimonials from customers, related imagery) to clearly visualize how the user could enjoy the time spent on a client's website.
i. WSFS Bank (SMART) Situation
1. S: Our national bank client wanted to compete with other banks offering a "knowledge center" of blog articles that touched on personal finance and banking topics 2. T: Develop a 5-month blog article implementation plan in order to capitalize on trending search queries and keywords in order to drive traffic to the site 3. A: Researched and collected data on trending topics in finance, and created suggestions to turn these topics into informational articles that would answer the users question completely. 4. R: The client's target blog keywords rose to the first and second pages of Google, and traffic to the website's knowledge center rose by 20%
Regression and Predictive Analytics
1. Using regression models to predict data without bias, learning to transform time-series data and find cyclical patterns
Survey Design and Sampling
Choosing an unbiased sample, designing questions in order to receive measurable data.
DELOITTE COMPANY RESEARCH:
Deloitte is the leading provider in professional services such as audit, tax advising, consulting, financial advisory. It's over 150 years old and employs almost 300,000 people globally. Its list of clients include Microsoft, MetLife, P&G, GM, and more. The consulting arm at Deloitte is a superior service, in fact, it was the only Big 4 firm to retain its consulting arm after Enron. The current global CEO, Punit Renjen, originally started in Deloitte consulting. Deloitte also provides upwards of $100 million in pro bono work, and has allowed over 50,000 people to attend Deloitte university to help them grow and develop. Deloitte has a reputation for having several advantages over the other firms in the Big 4, as well as other very large firms in general: A meritocratic system for promotion and diversity, both for race and gender.
Risk Management
How to find loss exposures, considering which risks are diversifiable or not, identifying ideas in case of financial/environmental/other risks taking place.
Financial accounting:
How to read financial statements, how to properly fill one out, and understanding which reports are useful for certain situations.
Healthcare. Why?
a. "Find the chaos". Healthcare in America has continued to face more challenges than other industries, has a negative connotation associated with the public/consumers, and needs to keep up with rapidly improving technology. I want to be a part of solving these large challenges, and transition healthcare provisions from REACTIVE to PROACTIVE using technology. i. Learning how healthcare administrators navigate challenges specific to healthcare (i.e. tax advantages for non-profits, cost shifting to offset Medicare and Medicaid patients, optimizing the reimbursement cycle, safely implementing technology). Finding solutions to organizational mini cases in coursework sparked my original interest in consulting. ii. Two areas of HCM I'm passionate about: 1. Opioid Crisis: The ease of increasing revenue and the dependency patients have with the drug has created a beast of a problem. Hospitals have found how efficient it is to prescribe patients and quickly move them in and out of the outpatient setting, but it is only hurting the patient more and more. State mandated tracking of prescriptions has helped, but correct usage and alternative methods to painkillers is still not right in the country. 2. Mental Health: There is a load of uncertainty surrounding how to diagnose and treat mental illness. I believe it should require a more complete approach to care: As opposed to prescription drugs and long mandatory psychiatrist interviews, there should be more interaction between people with similar illnesses and more varied life experiences and activities offered. More user-centric approach as opposed to treating the patient's brain like a broken bone they need to manually fix. The brain can help itself.
1. Dean's Office
a. A work-study opportunity that really helped develop my professional and organizational skills early in my college career. My main function in this role was to identify maintenance issues or malfunctions in the buildings associated with the business school, through either email requests or my own on-site analysis. These issues were relayed to my manager, and I managed a spreadsheet of all maintenance projects and their current progress in order to stay up-to-date on which projects were not addressed yet and be able reference past projects to identify problems that were not sufficiently fixed. b. Working alongside top-level employees in the business school and being able to assist with events, ceremonies, and ad-hoc requests 5 days a week forced me to be responsible and act in a professional manner on a consistent basis.
Statistics. Why?
a. Because data is becoming more and more valuable, and alongside that will be the growing value in people who can interpret it and communicate it effectively. I'm also mathematically gifted and believe I can act as a "link" between those focused on business decisions and those focused on data management. i. Currently receiving a "hybrid" degree in both business and technical disciplines. I am using coding software to analyze business data in order to find significant insights and make predictions. This includes survey design and sampling, experimental design, predictive modeling through regression, and more.
1. Why Deloitte?
a. Consulting arm faces some of the toughest challenges in the world of business and government. I want to be in that environment and pick up loads of experience to reach my maximum potential. b. Draws a huge number of intelligent employees, plethora of opportunities to network with coworkers and learn from them to grow professionally. c. Strong culture: Large emphasis on work-life balance, and a meritocratic system for advancing in the company
1. Why Deloitte GPS specifically?
a. Government projects means having a large impact on people's lives, and not just a company's profits, and that makes me feel good about the work I perform. b. Most innovation in technology is coming from the private sector, I want to work to implement these processes into government c. My interest in Healthcare gives me a solid foundation for potentially taking on projects in the Federal Health Care division
Tell me about yourself / Why are you a good fit?
a. I Love Challenges i. "Pressure is a privilege". Working on high-stakes projects or being in tense environments forces you to perform at your highest level, and this is how you grow as both a person and a professional. I find this adrenaline thrilling, which also comes out in my hobbies of exercising, skiing, and mountain biking. b. I Care about my Work i. I feel satisfied when I know my work is impacting a lot of people. I don't want my work to be about a paycheck, I want it to be about the results I can provide to a firm, individual, or group of people. Being able to personify data and tell a story after ana analysis project gives my work meaning, and that's what motivates me to do my best work. (This is emphasized in GPS since these issues aren't about increasing a profit but rather improving a process or service)
1. 5-Year Plan
a. I wish to remain in one company as I begin my career as opposed to bouncing around multiple firms. Hopefully after a full year at a company I've begun to handle larger responsibilities. After taking advantage of any opportunities that come my way, I'll hopefully begin to specialize, find my niche, and contribute to projects that require advanced expertise in my field. Hopefully along the way I find opportunities to grow in other ways, such as earning a degree/certificate or going through a program similar to Deloitte University.
1. Something NOT on your resume
a. Manager of a small seafood take-out restaurant between freshman and sophomore years of college. Required me to handle cash transactions and inventory counts, as well as delegating tasks to other employees. This responsibility grew my leadership capabilities.
1. Who's your role model?
a. My father. He has always set the best example for me to follow. In his work as a sales rep and sales manager, he has traveled the country, met hundreds of other professionals, and has garnered respect in his industry of selling educational equipment. Outside of his career, he's instilled important values in me and has ana amazingly big heart and caring personality.
1. Describe a time you used problem solving skills / overcame a challenge/conflict (STAR)
a. S: A client was unhappy with FourFront pushing back the dates of several deliverables, and the CEO held a company-wide meeting to plan how we can re-enact our trust and quality of work for this client. b. T: Several ideas for new web pages had not been drafted yet, and we needed to quickly visualize for the client the layout and design ideas FourFront had for these pages by the end of the day. c. A: I dropped my current task and drafted 2 original wireframes for webpages based on research conducted on top competitors and the client's users. Using a realtime editing tool, I was able to show the CEO my work and experiment with changes to assets and the page layout while simultaneously speaking with him over a video call. This allowed us to work efficiently and meet the time constraint. d. R: The client was impressed with the designs and asked us to wireframe future pages with the same basic format I had drafted. They were satisfied and their trust in us to deliver quality work had been restored.
1. Describe a situation where a teammate underperformed (S.T.A.R.)
a. S: During the Grant Thorton project, my coworker at the Dean's office who was also involved with the survey analysis wasn't able to perform all of her tasks. The project was occurring at a time where she was swamped with schoolwork, and she needed me to take the load off of her hands. b. T: I needed to take over her task of pulling notes and insights from the survey analysis and put them into a written document, along with my original task of doing the calculations and finding the distribution of survey responses. c. A: While pulling statistical parameters from the dataset, I simultaneously took notes on what I was seeing and essentially combined 2 tasks into one. This allowed me to come up with key insights and add virtually no time to what I was originally tasked with doing. d. R: When my teammate found find time to help when I was finished, she was able to take my work and create a slide deck with my results, and our PowerPoint file was delivered to Grant Thorton successfully and on-time.
1. Tell me about an achievement (STAR)
a. S: My boss had mentioned during a meeting that our keyword research process as a company was not consistent and thorough enough. This was timely, because I had a task to do keyword research for a university client the very next day b. T: I wanted to create my own method for identifying keyword opportunities and include this in my normal report, in hopes that this would display my understanding of how to properly conduct research the first time. c. A: I created a logic tree from the point of an ideal user that broke down what exactly they were looking for in content. I then did the same thing from the point of view of the client and broke down the content they were already providing. When placing these two visualizations towards each other and matching similar ideas, this allows someone to easily see what content the website is lacking in terms of user needs. d. R: My boss liked what he saw and asked me to edit our Keyword research SOP document to include this method.
1. Grant Thorton Project (STAR):
a. S: Temple's Business School had just been involved in a GPA ranking scandal that hurt their public image. They were interested in knowing the attitude of their stakeholders, whether that be faculty, students, or alumni, after news of the scandal went public. Fox hired Grant Thorton Consulting Company to create a survey for these stakeholders so that they could share their opinions b. T: I was asked to assist GT in cleaning and analyzing the survey response data so that valuable insights and key takeaways could be identified from the respondents. c. A: I conducted a break down of the data by stakeholder and organized positive and negative feedback through data analysis in Excel. I then used radar charts to clearly display the distribution of survey results, and also created a written outline of the most significant findings from the data. d. R: The insights and data visualizations were presented to the Dean and upper level management within Fox by Grant Thorton, which allowed them to create strategic initiatives to rebound from the crisis and improve the school's public image.
1. What is SEO?
a. Search Engine Optimization is the process of making a website look favorable to a search engine (such as Google), which crawls, indexes, and scores your website continuously. A favored website is one that is easy for the search engine to crawl (the HTML is clean and optimized), has quality content that the search engine deems useful or informative for users, and has other websites linking or crediting the site as a trusted source or expert.
1. What are your weaknesses?
a. Sometimes I need help on a task and take too long to ask for it i. Maybe due to over-analyzing a situation or trying my best not to overload another teammate, but sometimes the answer is a small clarification issue and all I need to do is quickly reach out b. I have trouble saying no to others when they need help i. This was especially evident at FourFront, where the extremely small team needed all the help they could get. I have limited hours while working at school and need to get better at managing my workload and saying no if need be to others who need help.
1. What are your strengths?
a. Team Player i. Dependable and always willing to help teammates in order to benefit the team's success ii. Very receptive to feedback and not afraid to challenge teammate's ideas in a respectful manner iii. I'm efficient when working with coworkers who have either mathematical or technological backgrounds as well as those with business and management backgrounds. b. Analytical thinker i. Always looking to go above and beyond the task at hand, and ask "Why?" 1. FourFront applauded me on this several times ii. Adept at looking at problems through multiple perspectives, especially in technology and putting myself in the shoes of a tech user. iii. Can use tools such as mindmaps and and logic trees to organize ideas and creatively brainstorm and look at problems with an otside-of-the-box point of view. c. Understand Both Sides of Data Science & Business Decisions i. My awareness of business and organizational needs helps me pull the most important insights from large datasets and research, leading to significant results. 1. Example: Seeing large numbers of searches regarding a company's specific product as opposed to informative content tells me they are far down the sales funnel and that product pages need to be optimized. ii. Clear communicator, between both teammates and clients. Can understand complex data analysis and communicate this to teammates or the client in an easy to understand format.
1. Why Consulting?
a. The challenge of the work. I want to be challenged early and often in my career in ways that require creative problem-solving, innovating, and thinking outside of the box. b. Team-base work. Consulting firms, specifically Deloitte, bring in the top minds in problem solving, and working with them and picking up knowledge through teamwork will be invaluable as I develop within a company c. Client interaction and travel. I love meeting and working with other people and learning about the industry and company they work for. These experiences help you understand how to better serve clients further down the road.
1. What are your interests?
a. humans and technology interaction, or HCI. While this definitely includes how we use everyday devices and applications such as smartphones and websites, it also includes advanced devices such as wearables in healthcare, and how the human body physically and mentally adapts to such a technology and how we can improve the experience b. Machine learning. This is the next big step in technology, and my stat classes this year are already alluding to how models can become so predictive and intelligent. I'm fascinated to see where this goes and how I can get involved.
a. Microsoft Office
i. Advanced skills in Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Excel expertise includes creating functions, conditionally formatting data, using data analysis and visualization tools. Little bit of VBA...
a. TUAMSTAT
i. Allowed me to hear from industry leaders and data science professionals and learn what they think companies value most in candidates for statistically related careers. What programs are the most in demand? What is the day to day in your position? Unfortunately I never had an opportunity to do any hands-on data analysis within the club, but the networking, meeting of statistics classmates, and learning more about statistics within real organizations helped prioritize what I wanted out of my career and what I should expect in the data analytics field
i. Frankford Pinterest (SMART) Situation
i. Frankford Pinterest (SMART) Situation 1. S: An umbrella manufacturing client wished to increase the number of views on their Pinterest page to draw more designers and business owners looking for design ideas to the client website 2. T: Recommend re-organization of current Pinterest content and suggest future content creation. 3. A: Used wireframing to create a new design and layout for the Pinterest page, as well as conducted competitor research and analyzed search data to create a sheet of recommended posts, as well as scheduled the timing for these posts in order to take advantage of seasonal trends 4. R: The page nearly doubled its amount of followers and the client capitalized on increased website traffic in time for their summer season
a. HBPS
i. General understanding of this problem-solving approach, which includes: 1. Formulating the problem statement clearly, contains all components of a SMART-Goal 2. Breaking the problem down into manageable, non-overlapping sub-problems via issue tree, and while doing so identifying and hypothesizing which sub-problems are priority tasks. Asking "Why" a lot. 3. Workplan design, allocating resources and collecting relevant data in order to complete each sub-task in a timely manner 4. Communicating the problem and recommended solution to stakeholders clearly and in a way that shows the logical steps you took from beginning to end, and why the client should care about each step that was taken.
a. Google Tech (Ads, Analytics, Data Studio)
i. Proficient in Keyword Planner, Search Console, and other Ads applications that allow you to identify keywords that have high search volume and bring the most traffic into the client site. Proficient in using Google Analytics to monitor website performance and trends, and additionally using the integrated Data Studio app to easily integrate real time data into reports that contain reports and visualizations that display multiple dimensions of analysis.
a. Programming (R, SAS, Python)
i. Proficient knowledge in both R and SAS, use these for analyzing large datasets and conducting advanced statistical tests and advanced regressions in order to identify significant variables. Currently learning in R how to use predictive modeling and identify time series trends. Down the road, I hope to use what I'm learning here to teach myself machine learning concepts, probably in tandem with data science tools found in Python packages or a block-based system such as Tensorflow. ii. Basic knowledge in Python, including creating nested functions and programs that react to user input. Created a card game in Python that followed a turn-based system and included a logical ruleset and scoreboard.
a. Ski/Snowboard
i. This is a real passion of mine. I went on a trip to Straton, Vermont, and made lifelong friends.
