Where He Is Now: Four Years Later

At the Mauritshuis in The Hague, The Netherlands (January 2015)

Today is Commencement Day for Yale SOM's Class of 2015, making it four years since I graduated from my MBA program, and one since my last post.

Since last writing, I remain a resident of Forest Hills, Queens, living with my boyfriend, and I still work at Deloitte. I was promoted last summer, so my title changed from Senior Consultant to Manager, and now I have more responsibilities, including supervising and counseling others. My beloved series of projects with a newspaper chain ended in October, after 2 1/2 years, and since then I have had three short projects: (1) post-M&A workforce transition in Los Angeles, (2) HR system implementation in New York, and (3) my current gig, a global culture assessment, also in New York. It's been valuable to expand my skills, broaden my horizons and all that, although the newspaper projects remain my favorite so far.

Derby

Outside of work, two particular highlights over the past 12 months have been getting a puppy and traveling. We found the puppy, whom we named Derby, while pulled over for dinner driving back from a weekend in Maryland. He was in the back of a truck, just a few weeks old, being transported from Louisiana to the Secaucus Animal Shelter in New Jersey. We fell in love, exchanged information with the driver, adopted him, and he was in our home a few days later. (Derby, not the driver.) A somewhat impulsive decision, but a great one. As a previous cat person, I have been surprised by my growing emotional attachment to this canine. He's the first dog I've lived with since I was 6.

On the London Eye (December 2014)

On the travel front, my boyfriend and I have been to Europe twice in the past year. The first time was nearly a year ago, when we went to London and Belgium for 8 days. Then in December-January, we took a full 8 weeks off for an amazing European adventure. I was able to do this because I had accrued a lot of PTO during the long newspaper project, so I decided to take it all together so I could really detach in a meaningful way. We spent all of December in England, in a fantastic town called Lewes. Then in January we traveled to Amsterdam, Hasselt (in Belgium), Paris, Aix-en-Provence and Monaco, before going back to spend a few final days in Brighton, in England. Along the way we took lots of day trips to places like The Hague, Antwerp, Metz, Marseilles, Cassis, Nice, and Eze, making many friends throughout our travels with whom we've fortunately been able to keep up, thanks to Facebook. The whole trip was one of the best experiences of my life, if not the very best.

Readjusting from vacation back to work was tough, but on the bright side, all my assignments since returning have been local, enabling me to live a more rooted, normal life -- see friends, work out, play tennis, etc. Still, though, if I won big in the lottery, I'd live a life of European leisure.

How I often feel

So, what's next? I'm rare among my business school friends for being with the same company since graduating in 2011, largely because I gave little to no thought about other opportunities while I was on those newspaper projects. In the six months since then, though, I've had more time to think about whether I want to build a career as a management consultant, or perhaps go in another direction. For some people, consulting is a means to an end -- a way to accelerate their development by getting exposed to a wide variety of industries, business problems and professional connections. But for others, it's just a great job -- exciting, fast-paced, fun. I wasn't thinking long-term when I got into consulting, but for now I'm staying put.

See you in 2016.