Hi, I'm Ria. Thank you for coming to interview with us today. Let's just go ahead and get started with a quick introduction. Could you tell me a little bit about yourself? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. So a bit about myself. I'm originally from Morocco, where I lived pretty much my whole life. I then came to Boston and studied industrial engineering at Northeastern University. While I was in college, I did a few different internships. I did technical ones at a local power plant and at Amazon Robotics, and I also did one in consulting at the Boston Consulting Group, and was also the president of the consulting club at my university. So really, I'm someone who enjoys both the business side of things, but I also do have a passion for technology. So down the line, my goal is to start my own education technology company in my home country, Morocco, so I can make education more affordable through the use of tech. And outside of school and work, I also do magic tricks on college campuses.

That sounds like a very impressive background. So why exactly are you interested in interviewing with our consulting firm? My reasons for joining your consulting firm are twofold. Number one, I think the exposure to the strategy work is very appealing to me. And then second, the opportunities for externship is also one that I'm highly looking at. So on the strategy side, I know that your consulting firm is one of the few that gives you exposure to C-suite executives and to strategy-type projects early on in your career. And then the second reason is the opportunity to do externships in Africa focused on education.

Could you tell me about a time where you solved a difficult problem? I think the moment that I can think of is when I was working at the electrical power plant. We were trying to launch a new department, and my task was to essentially source a supplier. Typically, we work with a supplier of generators from France, but this time around, their capacity and pricing did not match our budget. So I ended up creating a large list of all the different suppliers and found a supplier in South Korea that I negotiated with and was able to bring them in and implement all of the new generator technology. That saved us a total cost of ten percent from the total project.

Could you tell me about a time you were able to convince someone to change their mind? When I was working at Amazon, one of the big projects was the first new robotic facility. But COVID had just hit, and I was unable to source material from our Japanese supplier. The vice president of supply chain wanted to push the launch out for a few months. Instead, I looked at some of our existing facilities and tried to source unused material from there. Through analysis and explaining to him that we could source it from the other facilities, I was able to convince the VP to not delay the launch.

Could you tell me about a time that you demonstrated strong leadership skills? When I was working at the Boston Consulting Group, I was leading a big real estate occupancy project. I had to work with a large team of 15 different developers, software engineers, and data engineers. We gathered the data, cleaned it, processed it and visualized it through Tableau. The partners were very happy with the dashboard.