Lever, Inc., North Adams, MA
This summer, I interned as a Management Consultant Intern at Lever, Inc.—a start-up incubator which seeks to promote business and boost the economy of the Berkshire area. Lever does this by creating and building scalable companies that will attract revenues to the region and create jobs. Lever also runs a number of entrepreneur and “intrapreneur” challenges that are designed to encourage companies to innovate from within while competing for a grand prize that will support their vision and help their company grow.
During a normal summer, Lever would be running their Intrapreneur Challenge, and interns would be providing support to the companies competing in the challenge with market research and competitive analyses. This summer, Lever was instead asked to run the Massachusetts Covid-19 Intrapreneur Challenge, in collaboration with MassTech. During my internship, I did work both to support this Covid-19 Intrapreneur Challenge, along with different projects for Lever’s portfolio companies or companies that had previously won one of Lever’s challenges.
My first project at Lever was for Multiscale Systems, a metamaterials company based in Worcester. Multiscale asked us to research the electric vehicle industry and make recommendations on how they should position themselves to enter the market. This project was an extremely difficult first project, with a steep learning curve. After getting acquainted with the electric vehicle industry, I proceeded to reach out to Williams alumni in the industry to talk to them about opportunities and weaknesses in the industry. Ultimately, I built a leave-behind slide deck with a full market analysis and competitive analysis of different components of the electric vehicle industry and possible opportunities for their product. While this project was a challenging place to start, I ultimately learned a lot over the course of doing it, and felt even more prepared for the projects that followed it.
My internship experience at Lever was extremely valuable to me. I really enjoyed the consulting format of short projects that you can get fully immersed into, before moving onto a new project. It also brought to light some places where I want to continue to improve and learn—for example, I now know that I want to take more economics classes during my time at Williams. More importantly, however, it made it clear to me that consulting is a field that I am interested in and want to continue to pursue. I am excited by the amount of exposure that consulting offers to different industries and I like the analytical method of thinking that the work requires. This internship was a great introduction to the field, and in an extremely supportive environment that makes a difference in the Berkshire area.
I’d like to thank Mr. William McCalpin for this opportunity. Despite the challenges that Covid-19 brought to this summer, I was able to have a truly valuable internship experience that I’m sure I’ll never forget.
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