WorldCare International, Boston, MA
This summer I was a global business strategy intern at WorldCare International that provides gold standard medical second opinions (MSO’s) for critical illnesses to covered members around the world. They do this through a network of top hospitals from across the United States named the WorldCare Consortium, and for 27 years this service has often changed diagnosis and/or treatment plans that has in many cases saved lives. My job was to work closely with management in order to develop strategy and contribute to the company’s strategic plan for upcoming global market share expansion. I accomplished this through conducting thorough analyses on international competitors, clients, and prospective markets, as well as utilizing the information to initiate a cohesive strategy plan that will continue to be developed and utilized long after my internship ends. Other tasks included evaluating acquisition targets; coordinating with a range of company employees such as the nurses, account managers, and sales associates; and performing quantitative analyses on data from finances.
The end of the summer culminated in what the co-intern and I called our strategy document. It is a slide deck that we presented on our final day that was developed most broadly to determine where to invest the company’s next dollar. It contains research on where the company and competitors stand currently, research on what different MSO markets look like in countries around the world, and our work to gauge what opportunities these markets offer to WorldCare. A lot of what was put into this project was brainstormed by me and my intern partner, which was really cool for us because it felt like we had real initiative and say on the operations of a multimillion-dollar company. One specific aspect of this project that we spent a lot of time working on was developing a way to screen countries’ market potential, which would help prevent us from expending resources unnecessarily or inefficiently. We did this by creating a scorecard based on what we deemed as attractive factors for a country to possess, and this allowed us to categorize different countries into a scale of potential.
Overall, this experience has been an important step forward for me. Right now, I am interested in doing strategic consulting, and this experience parallels many of the aspects of this line of work: enter a company in an industry I am not entirely familiar with, quickly learn about its business model and business problems, and work with them to develop solutions and strategy moving forward. I am sure I will take the lessons I learned from this summer forward with me as I plan to apply to consulting firms in the fall. Truthfully, this experience completely exceeded my expectations as I enjoyed every part of it, mainly due to the work being extremely interesting and fulfilling and the people being nothing but supportive. I want to offer my thanks to WorldCare and specifically Ed Wiggers for creating a fantastic internship program, as well as to the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for making this experience possible!