Meet the TAs – Phoebe Brown – Management Consulting Lisbon 2019.

"The iX consulting course helped me realign my career passions and taught me the skills necessary to attain the perfect first consulting job out of college, all while making fantastic friends and memories in Cape Town. Now I'm ready to help other students find their path."

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As an alumnus of the 2015 iX Management Consulting course in Cape Town, and Princeton graduate, Phoebe has since pursued her passion for advising better business solutions at management consulting firm EY-Parthenon. Over the past three years, Phoebe has worked on over 40 growth strategy, go-to-market strategy, and investment strategy projects as a generalist, most recently focusing her efforts in the technology, media, & telecommunications and consumer sectors. This summer, she'll be coaching and teaching our Management Consultant students in Lisbon. We think they're lucky to have her.

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Phoebe Brown – Management Consultant TA, iXperience Lisbon 2019

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1. What are you working on now? Tell us about an exciting project that you’ve recently completed or are currently involved with.

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Most recently, I’ve worked on two separate projects advising private equity clients on potential public-to-private buyouts. Take-private transactions have constituted a small proportion of buyout deals in recent years, so working on two separate PE-backed public-to-private buyouts in the beginning of 2019 has been a unique experience!

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2. What do you enjoy most the Consulting industry?

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Consulting offers me the opportunity to work on fast-paced projects across a variety of industries. The versatile nature of the job means I’m constantly learning, which is one of my top priorities for any role. One week I may be studying the market for subscription fashion and advising growth strategy initiatives for a well-known consumer brand, and the next week I might be examining the product roadmap for market-disrupting communications and collaboration software. Consulting keeps me on my toes!

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3. What are your career goals? How are you planning to achieve them?

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My professional development at EY-Parthenon has brought me to a point in the job where I am managing and driving key insights for clients. For now, this is a rewarding role at a great company, but in the future I see myself moving from consulting to industry or starting a company of my own. I will likely apply to business school in the next year or so where I plan to leverage my consulting background and business acumen to work on a startup idea and solidify future career goals and plans.

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4. Why did you decide to get involved with teaching?

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I’m driven by continuous learning, and imparting my learnings to others has always represented the rewarding culmination of any learning process! I’ve been teaching in a variety of ways for some time now, starting in high school when I started my own tutoring company for SAT/ACT prep and homework help. At Princeton, I continued this trend, working as an English teacher at a Costa Rican school for a summer and serving as the Princeton Branch Manager for Milestone Academic Counseling, where we provided test prep and counseling to local students. Finally, at EY-Parthenon, I’ve worked as both a coordinator and a teacher for our incoming associate training programs, empowering new employees with the fundamentals of the consulting toolkit and the skills necessary to thrive in their new roles. This summer I’ll continue the education trend with iX, where I look forward to applying what I’ve learned from both consulting and educating to drive an innovative and impactful program and help students achieve their full potential.

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5. You’re an iX alum! Describe your iX experience? How did it shape your career? Why did you decide to return to teach? :)

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My time at iX 4 years ago represents a fundamental inflection point in my personal and professional growth. I started that summer overwhelmed with uncertainty, unsure of what I wanted to do after college since I had focused my studies in pre-law and had a number of law internships throughout college and highschool that no longer piqued my interest in a long term law career. The iX consulting course helped me realign my career passions and taught me the skills necessary to attain the perfect first consulting job out of college, all while making fantastic friends and memories in Cape Town. Now I'm ready to help other students find their path, and how better to do that than through the same program that helped me!

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6. How do you see the Consulting industry changing in the next 5 years? What skills will industry professionals need to have?

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Today the industry is constantly focusing on technology-enabled disruption and how best to prepare and enable clients to succeed in a rapidly evolving and increasingly digital world. In order to serve clients, we must be early adopters and innovators ourselves. An adaptive mindset and transformative approach to problem-solving is necessary for continued success, while leveraging an understanding of big data, artificial intelligence, collaborative tools, and other technologies helps ensure future relevance!

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7. One piece of advice that you have for the iX class of 2019?

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Apply yourself to the course, your internship, and most importantly the experience of working and learning in a foreign country. Seek out the summer you want to have and acknowledge the fact that you have a full career ahead of you, so enjoy the portion of it that you spend with iX! There will be late nights working with your peers on homework, final projects, and internship obligations, but there will also be late nights spent exploring the city and making amazing memories with new friends. Remember that both are important and balance is key.

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8. Hidden talents, an unusual past, a hobby?

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I have 10+ house plants (hopefully they will survive my two months away in Lisbon) and I have been trying and failing to write a novel for a while now… maybe Lisbon will cure my writer's block. I also maintained a penpal-ship with my favorite author in elementary school and he ended up writing me a letter of recommendation for college!